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.

Gyo Fujikawa's A to Z Picture Book

Gyo Fujikawa's A to Z Picture Book is amazing and gorgeous. When I picked it up in the bookstore and flipped through it, I was just in awe. I expected to find a $25 price tag on the back, but lo and behold, it costs $9.95. I could not believe it! This is a steal, and it is totally worth buying in hardback and new at that price. (The book is recently back in print after the 1970s version went out of print, and I don't know how the original compares.)

I only bought this book about six months ago, but I imagine that it would be a great one for infants and toddlers. It doubles as a vocabulary book, with numerous labeled illustrations of individual things on each letter's page. A young child would be interested in the book for language learning years before the alphabet has any meaning.

The downside to this approach to the alphabet is that there is no "story" or rhyme to read through, and there is a lot to look at on each page. Charlie enjoys looking at it for a little bit, but we will just do a page or two before he loses interest. That's fine with me, but I just have to make sure to start at a different page each time.

Legible Capital and Lowercase: A. The capital letter is shown in a very large font at the top left of each page, and the lowercase at the bottom right (a few pages mix it up and use top-right/bottom-left). The illustrations do interact with the letters, which has the potential to be a little bit confusing, but I don't find that they detract from the legibility.

Filler Words: A. A few comments about the format of this book are necessary at this point. Most letters get a full two-page black and white spread, with the large capital and lowercase and a bunch of things that start with that letter illustrated and labeled. Some of the less popular letters share a two-page spread, for example E on the left page and F on the right. Interspersed with these are two-page color spreads, but when two letters share a black and white page, only one of those letters gets a color page (E, G, I, K, O, Q, U, V, X, and Z do not have color pages). All of the black and white pages use the same format, but the color pages vary widely. A is contemplative: "A is for alone, / all by myself . . . / Hi, there, frog! / Can I play with you?" The illustration shows mostly sky and empty swamp, with just a lone girl standing, looking at frog on a rock. B is an entirely different experience: "B is for busy babies!" is the sole text, and the illustration shows literally dozens of babies and toddlers engaged in all manner of activities, interspersed with animals--and there are no labels. An infant or young toddler could spend easily 20 minutes with a parent pointing out all the things and activities on this page.

So, the black and white pages have little opportunity for filler words, since they are just labeled illustrations. Even so, there are some. One picture on the C page is labeled "Clara is crawling;" another is "Cat and copycat." The color pages do use filler words, but they are so carefully chosen and poetic (not in a rhyming way, but in an evocative way) that I have trouble thinking of them as "filler." Other color pages have hardly any words, or are highly alliterative ("F is for friends, fairies, flowers, fish, and frogs.")

Cheat Words: A-. In general, the author was extremely creative in coming up with words for unusual letters (zinnia, zero, zombie, zipper, zebra, and zoom!). She does sometimes use different starting sounds for a letter, but all of them very normal alternate sounds (under vs. unicorn). I'm not a fan of the X page, however (x-ray, X marks the spot, XXXXXX is for kisses, X is for railroad crossing, xeranthemum, xylophone).

Understandable Words: A. Okay, some of them are weird (didn't I just mention xeranthemum?), but they are all understandable. The xeranthemum is clearly illustrated and labeled, and even though I'd never heard the word before, I'm quite certain now that it's that kind of flower pictured right there. Unusual flower, bird, and animal names make lots of appearances, but I think that's fine because they are very concrete. A lot of abstract words are mixed in, but they are ones that a child can easily grasp, like "pout" and "hungry" and "crybaby."

Sounding Out: B. There are plenty of good sounding-out words here (eggs, fox, fish, lark, milk), but the font is pretty small for a little kid and it would be hard to focus that well. These words are mixed in with a lot that are not phonetic.

Hidden Pictures: (none). There is plenty of detail to notice in many of the color spreads, but there is no particular emphasis on including things that start with the same letter.

Illustrations: A. I did not recognize the name Gyo Fujikawa, but apparently she was a celebrated children's author and illustrator from the late 1950s through 1990. You will immediately recognize the illustration style when you pick up the book. My immediate thought was that this looked like a sappy-sweet 1950s gender-stereotypical morality-play type of illustration. But as soon as you start looking at what is actually there, you will discover amazing talent and depth in the illustrations. Faces are expressive in innumerable ways. Contrasts in subject matter leap off the page. Composition is just gorgeous. Reality and fantasy are equally well portrayed. It's a gem.

Theme (none).

You should buy this one. It's a bargain at twice the price.

Basher: ABC Kids

Basher: ABC Kids is a book that I love in theory, but in practice it has trouble holding Charlie's attention. He'll be interested for a few pages, maybe even half of the book, but then he'll wander off to do something else. I haven't figured out why. It's not too long, just a sentence for each letter. The illustrations are funny and attractive, with vibrant colors. Maybe the words are a bit too complex, or he's put off by the lack of rhymes. But I want so much for him to like it.... It scores very high on most of my alphabet book criteria.

Legible Capital and Lowercase: A. This is a large book (8.5 x 11 pages) with little content, so everything inside is big and bold. The individual letters are showcased in huge font on the entire bottom half of the left-hand page, capital and lowercase. The bottom of the right-hand page shows the entire alphabet in small lowercase letters, with the featured letter for that page in bold with an underline. The font is not too fancy, though Charlie did have a bit of trouble identifying the Q because of a weird tail. Some of the illustrations show characters standing or sitting on top of the letters, which can be a little bit distracting but is also really cute.

Filler Words: A+. This book has zero filler words, even though it is written in sentences! I cannot emphasize enough how rare this is. They pull off this trick by being imaginative with verbs and by writing a lot in plurals so no a/an/the is needed. "Arthur's angry ant ate apples." "Brianna bounces beautiful bugs." "Claude's crafty cuckoo collects coins." All the way through "Zack zaps zeppelins!" It's brilliant.

Cheat Words: A. They've done an excellent job picking words that legitimately start with the letters and have the correct sound. X is the hardest, of course, and they've gone with "Xavier x-rays xylophones." Not perfect, but not terrible either. I'm happy to forgive this because they did such a great job on "Queenie questions quivering quails."

Understandable Words: C. This is certainly part of what loses Charlie's interest. The book gets pretty abstract at times with words like quivering, elegant, crafty, irritable, marvelous. He has to ask what they mean, and they're not easy for me to define, either. And they can't really be drawn in the illustrations.

Sounding Out: B. Each letter gets a two-page spread. The left side has the sentence at the top and the large letters at the bottom, with an illustration of the sentence. The right side has the full alphabet at the bottom and at the top, it repeats a single word from the sentence and shows a large illustration of just that one thing. These words are pretty good for sounding out. Apple, bug, cuckoo, dog. Not all the words in the book are phonetic, but the majority of these featured ones are.

Hidden Pictures: (none).

Illustrations: A. I love the visual style of this book. It manages to be vibrant while using pastels, somehow. The characters are manga-inspired, with round faces and horizontal lines for eyes. The sentences are cleverly illustrated, even if not all of the nuances of the words can come across to a child. It's very well done.

Theme: (none).

I didn't realize until I was writing this review that Basher books are a series. There seem to be a variety about science and math topics, mainly aimed at somewhat older kids. They have great reviews on Amazon, so maybe this author is better at appealing to older kids than to the 3-year-old set. Perhaps Charlie would appreciate this book more if he were older and had a more extensive vocabulary. I suspect that he'll be well beyond alphabet books by the time he understands what an elegant elephant is, but that will not be true of all children. I love this book so much that I hope the target market manages to find it.

Caps for Sale

Caps for Sale is an awesome book. If you don't own it already, you need to go buy a copy right now. I'll wait here until you get back. Okay, okay, you can read the review first if you really have to. But trust me, this is a great one. I loved it as a child, Charlie loves it now, and I still love it as an adult.

The story of this book is very simple. A peddler sells caps, walking around town with all the caps stacked on top of his head in a huge tower. One day, nobody wants to buy any caps, so he goes for a walk in the countryside and falls asleep under a tree. When he wakes up, he finds that all the caps are missing, except for his own cap. Looking around, he finds that a group of monkeys have taken his caps and escaped up a tree. How will he get them back?

This book has some serious staying power. Charlie is as obsessed with the book at almost-three years old as he was at 18 months. The story is cleverly told, but with lots of repetitive phrases to draw in young children. For example, whenever the book mentions his caps, it talks about "[the peddler's] own checked cap, then a bunch of gray caps, then a bunch of brown caps, then a bunch of blue caps, and on the very top, a bunch of red caps." There are plenty of opportunities to count the caps and point out their colors.

The best part of the book is the story of how the peddler tries to get his caps back from the monkeys. The illustrations are great -- the peddler in his suit and cap standing at the base of the tree, looking up, and the monkeys hanging from the branches, each wearing one of his caps. The peddler is a little bit angry, but he's pretty sure he can work things out with a simple appeal.

"You monkeys, you," he said, shaking a finger at them, "you give me back my caps."
But the monkeys only shook their fingers back at him and said, "Tsz, tsz, tsz."

This made the peddler angry, so he shook both hands at them and said, "You monkeys, you! You give me back my caps."
But the monkeys only shook both their hands back at him and said, "Tsz, tsz, tsz."

A few pages later, the peddler is so angry that he's essentially having a temper tantrum, stomping his feet and waving his fists and shouting at the monkeys up in the tree. And the monkeys are still playing their game, imitating everything he does. And then the peddler gives up.

At last he became so angry that he pulled off his own cap, threw it on the ground, and began to walk away.

The monkeys have been copying everything he does up to now, and surprise, surprise, they copy this action, too. They throw the caps to the ground and leave the peddler alone.

So the peddler picked up his caps and put them back on his head--first his own checked cap, then the gray caps, then the brown caps, then the blue caps, then the red caps on the very top.

And slowly, slowly, he walked back to town calling, "Caps! Caps for sale! Fifty cents a cap!"

I absolutely love the way they show the peddler's temper tantrum progressing bit by bit as he gets angrier. And particularly, how all of his yelling and screaming and shouting doesn't work at all. It's a great lesson for kids (and grownups!) about how not to convince someone to do what you want.

The other thing I really love about this story is the way the mood progresses in a cycle. It's very calm at the beginning, and then it builds up the huge emotional temper tantrum in the middle, and then once the peddler gets his caps back, it returns to the same calm and peaceful tone of the beginning. I've been looking for books to help Charlie deal with his emotions, and I think Caps for Sale gives an excellent model of how to calm back down and accept the good after an emotional outburst.

A note on versions and ages: I bought the board book version of Caps for Sale when Charlie was about 18 months old. He loved it and wanted to read it every day. Unfortunately, we lost the book while we were on vacation a few months later. Eventually I got around to buying a new one, and since Charlie was two and a half by that time, I went for the paperback instead of the board book. It turns out that the board book leaves out some interesting details of the story, but nothing crucial. I would recommend going straight for the paperback. You can buy the paperback alone, or for just an extra two dollars, you can get it packaged together with a CD that narrates the story and adds some songs. In my opinion, the songs are just so-so, but Charlie loves listening to it in the car. This is the first book-CD package I've tried, but I will certainly be doing some more in the future.

Caps for Sale gets my absolute highest recommendation. It's a wonderful story, well-written, with great lessons, and has excellent power to hold a child's interest.

This Is the Rain

We've been on something of a kick with cumulative poems lately, with some I've reviewed before and another one that I'm planning to review soon. Today's cumulative poem is This Is the Rain. I was a bit nervous when I picked it up at the library right as we were running to check out, because I thought it might be full of environmentalist nonsense. But in fact it's not, and it turned out to be a solid choice.

The book is about the water cycle, and with each verse of the poem it introduces a new phase of the cycle. It begins, "This is the ocean, blue and vast, that holds the rainwater from the past." Next it introduces sunshine, then water vapor, then clouds. Finally we see actual rain, and then the land that absorbs the water, and the puddles that form after a storm. On the last page, we see running water, creeks and rivers that flow back into the sea. It's a very effective introduction that touches all parts of the water cycle in a catchy poem without cumbersome scientific explanation that would be too much for a toddler.

The illustrations are not really my style, but some people might like them. It's that sort of modern style that I sometimes describe as "throw a lot of relevant things onto the page in random places." So, the night sky is full of ... starfish, and the seahorses stick their noses out of the water. Oh yeah, and there's a random apatosaurus at the bottom of the ocean. Whatever. The colors are quite vivid, however, and all of the items are real if their placement leaves something to be desired.

In sum, this is a nice one to read a few times, but I wouldn't have purchased it.

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!

The Midnight Farm

The Midnight Farm is a nearly perfect bedtime story. Once again, I've chosen a book that is out of print, but plenty of used copies are available on Amazon. I've written before about books that create a mood, and this one is an excellent example of the genre. Charlie is usually wide awake when we finish reading his bedtime stories, but this one makes even him a little bit sleepy.

The story is simple and intuitive. A mother gets her son ready for bed by walking around the farm with him, looking at all the animals ready for the night. Some of the animals are settling in to sleep, while others are nocturnal and engaged in their activities.

The book is written in very nice poetry, which contributes to the mood. I'm sure there's a name for this form, but I don't know it -- the first line of each verse is the same as the last line of that verse, with a different beginning. Each verse begins, "Here is the dark of [place]" and it ends, "In the dark of the [place]." Here's one verse to give you a sample:

Here is the dark of the maple tree
Where a raccoon family, one, two, three,
Is making a home in a place that was free
In the dark of the maple tree.

I didn't notice until I was on page five or six of my first reading, but this is also a counting book. After the introductory verse, each page counts up one more animal, to ten. We start with one dog, then two cats, three raccoons, four geese, five horses, etc. This is very subtle, without calling attention to it and without the numbers printed on the pages.

My only complaint about this book is that two of the verses don't rhyme properly. It's very disappointing, since the rest of the book (and the poetry!) is so fantastic, and I wish the author could have fixed this. One verse rhymes stove/glove/love, and another rhymes pond/around/sound. It's annoying, but I'm willing to overlook it because the book is so wonderful in other ways.

The illustrations are also amazing. They are extremely realistic paintings. The people and animals look almost like you could reach out and touch them. The colors are varied, yet muted for evening and bedtime. Just looking at the pictures here is a real treat.

This is a wonderful book for a quiet and peaceful bedtime or naptime story. Charlie sometimes asks for it during the day, too, and then he likes to count the animals and point out the ones that aren't mentioned in the text ("One, two, three raccoons, and an owl!"). I really can't believe this one went out of print.

It Takes a Village

This review is a "don't judge a book by its cover" tale. Sometime last summer, Charlie and I stumbled across a garage sale held by a recently retired elementary school teacher who was selling off enormous quantities of kids' books for twenty-five cents each. I bought about forty books there, I am not kidding. Some of them were fantastic. Others just okay. It's hard to go through hundreds of books while a squirmy toddler sits in his stroller, and at twenty-five cents a pop, I erred on the side of purchase more often than I otherwise would. When I saw It Takes a Village, judging by the title alone, I assumed it would be terrible. I bought it so that I could have a good laugh and then chuck it in the trash.

It actually turned out to be a rather good book.

Who would have thought?

The only thing I actually dislike about this book is the title and its repetition on the last page of the book. The rest of the story is great, and the pictures are quite nice also.

The story takes place in an African village. (If you look closely at the signs in the background images, you'll notice a French influence. The author's notes on the last page of the book say that it's Benin.) A mother and her daughter and son take their mangos to the market to sell them. The girl, Yemi, around 7 or 8 years old, is given the task of looking after her younger brother, Kokou, who is probably 2 or 3. They set off to look around the market together, but Kokou soon wanders off and Yemi spends the rest of the book looking for him.

Yemi is worried, but Kokou is having a grand time walking around the market and meeting all the friendly people who are selling their wares. Different people give him food, water, entertainment, and a place to nap. Yemi finally finds Kokou and walks back through the market with him, thanking all of the people who helped him throughout the day. Finally they return to their mother, who is not surprised or worried at all. She knows that "it takes a village to raise a child" -- by which she means that the community members are friendly and benevolent and can be trusted.

I really like this moral, just not the words that it is phrased in. In the first place, the children are very free-range. Their mother lets them wander around the market without supervision even though they are quite young, and then the pre-schooler manages to set off on his own and is perfectly fine. This wandering is not shown as subversive or dangerous, but actually quite natural and expected by the mother and all the other adults in the story. And the reason that it's so safe for the kids to wander around freely is that the adults in the community are trusted, even if they are strangers, and they are all relaxed and friendly. This is exactly the kind of community that everyone wants to be a part of. The phrasing is not perfect. It doesn't take a village to "raise" a child. It takes a benevolent community to create a society in which children can exercise full age-appropriate independence. But that's not such a catchy title, I guess.

The illustrations in this book are realistic and use vibrant colors. Charlie loves to point out all the different items for sale in the market and all the activities that Kokou does with the grownups he meets. He is particularly intrigued by the fact that Kokou doesn't wear a shirt or shoes. ("Mommy, why him go outside with no shoes?") My only minor complaint about the illustrations is that on a couple of pages, there are multiple "time-lapse" pictures of the same characters on the same page. This can be confusing to kids who don't understand why there are four Yemis on this page. But it's a small point compared to the valuable things in the book.

So. You can't judge a book by its title.

Have You Seen My Potty?

Yes, yes, I know. Bear with me.

Despite the gross subject matter, Have You Seen My Potty? is a really great book. I was skeptical at first. But this story is actually humorous, and kids of potty-training age will be riveted, just as they are with all things poop. Best of all, no actual poop appears in this book!

"This is the story of Suzy Sue," the book announces on page one, "who had something very important to do." Suzy Sue appears in the illustration, smiling and proudly holding up her bright red potty chair. Unfortunately, just as she's sitting down to use it, a cow grabs it out from under her and she lands smack on her bottom on the ground.

"What a terrible thing. What an awful to-do. Who would play such a trick on poor Suzy Sue?" A good question, indeed. Why would "a rascal quite ruthless and rotten . . . steal someone's potty from under their bottom!" (At this point, Charlie always interjects, "Suzy Sue fall down! Oh no! Why she fall down?")

Meanwhile, on the other side of the barnyard, the cow, sheep, goat, horse, and several chickens are gathered around to examine the "poo pot" the cow has found just "lying around on the ground." The animals all line up to give it a try while Suzy Sue, stuffed rabbit in tow, searches the farm for her potty.

In a series of clever twists, Suzy Sue asks each of the animals if they've seen her potty, while that animal is actually using the potty. But the potty is hidden from her view each time--by a newspaper, a clump of grass, a scarf being knitted, or just around the corner. A failure of communication arises because Suzy Sue calls the object a potty while the animals are calling it a poo-pot. As the horse puts it, "Of course he'd not seen her potty. He knew this because he had no idea what a potty was!"

Suzy Sue eventually gives up, and since she really really really has to go, she decides to do it au naturale behind a plant. (This, by the way, is the most hilarious thing ever to a two-year-old. "No, Suzy Sue! We not poop in the grass!") Fortunately, the animals realize what she's about to do and provide the poo-pot for her use at the last minute. Whew! So, "That was the story of Suzy Sue, who had something very important to do."

The text is almost laugh-out-loud funny for grown-ups, and the illustrations are great, too. I love all the ways the potty is hidden from Suzy Sue's view, and also the numerous hold-it-in poses of the animals waiting in line for their turn.

My only real complaint with this book is that the story is hard to follow at Charlie's age. It depends on understanding that the animals (and the reader) can see something that Suzie Sue can't, which I believe is a concept developed more around the age of three and a half or four. The text goes back and forth from Suzy Sue's perspective to the animals' perspective, and I'm certain that Charlie isn't following it entirely. This doesn't seem to bother him in the least, however, since he asks for it every time we go to the bathroom and can nearly recite the entire text from memory. It's a huge hit in our household, and I definitely like that it stresses the importance of getting to the bathroom and not just the how-to aspect of using the potty like most other potty training books cover. Highly recommended!

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.

Puff, the Magic Dragon

The beauty of this picture book version of Puff, the Magic Dragon perfectly matches the beauty of the original song by Peter, Paul, and Mary. I fell in love with it the moment I saw it. The book comes packaged together with a CD of the song performed by Peter and his daughter Bethany, but I can't tell you anything about the recording because I bought this book used and the CD was not included.

The song has always made me cry a little bit, and this book did the same. As I've mentioned before, I'm a sucker for growing-up or cycle-of-life stories, and this certainly is one. Jackie has so much fun with Puff, and then grows up and stops playing with him. This book adds a happy ending to the story, though. The words are the same as in the song, but on the final chorus, the illustrations show a new little girl coming to play with Puff. The last page reveals a grown-up Jackie Paper peeking in on the scene, implying that the girl is his daughter.

The illustrations in this book are unbelievably beautiful. The front cover image really does not do justice to the illustrations, and Amazon doesn't have a look-inside feature for this book, so you'll have to take my word for it. They are stunning. The inside covers show maps of the land of Honalee. The pages are gorgeous fantasy paintings that combine realistic and fantastical elements to create the effect that you're truly seeing inside Jackie's imagination. There are many details and hidden elements throughout: fairies, buildings in the distance, rocks that look like faces. I haven't read the book enough times to notice even half of them, I'm sure.

This is quite a sad story, with a deep friendship breaking up as Jackie grows older, and I was a little bit concerned about presenting it to Charlie. And indeed, Charlie was upset when we first read it. He kept asking me why Jackie and Puff are not friends any more. We talked about it at length, discussing how Jackie grew up and dragons are friends with little kids, not grown-ups. I pointed out the little girl who comes to be Puff's new friend, and explained that Jackie is her dad. I don't think Charlie understands exactly what's going on, but he's not traumatized by it. He likes to point out the little girl's dad hiding behind the tree, but I don't think he makes the connection yet that the dad is Jackie as a grown-up. Still, Charlie requests the book frequently and loves the pictures and the song, and he will certainly grow into it.

I adore this book. It's very emotional for me, so it's difficult to explain exactly what I love about it so much. The story is sad yet sweet, the pictures are beautiful, and the song is a folk classic, but together these elements add up to something even more.

The Day the Babies Crawled Away

When I first read The Day the Babies Crawled Away, I thought the pictures were stunning but the text was pretty lame. Apparently, I am not a two-year-old, because the moment Charlie first heard it read to him, he was enthralled. And after just a couple of readings, it began to grow on me. This is nowhere near great literature, but it's not annoying or boring, either. And the pictures definitely make up for it.

The pictures! All of the characters, scenery, and details are done in black silhouette, intricately detailed. There are many details to notice--butterflies, bees, blackberries on a bush, caterpillars--all pure black silhouettes. What really grabs you, though, are the luminous backgrounds. All the jeweled colors of the sky appear, subtly different page after page, giving the feeling that the entire book is happening at sunset even though we see the tones slowly change from day to evening over the course of the story. The book is just gorgeous to look at.

The story is pretty cute. The adults aren't paying attention one day, and the babies all crawl away. The only person who notices is a very young boy wearing a fireman's hat. He chases after the babies, trying to get them to come back. The babies crawl through forests and caves, take rides on birds, and end up at the bottom of a cliff before the boy catches up with them. He then takes over a parental role, finding them food and serving as a pillow for their nap, before leading them back home to their grateful parents. Nice and free-range: The babies get along reasonably well without their parents, and it's a little kid who steps up, takes responsibility, and successfully brings them home.

So, what is it about the text? I think it's a bit choppy in parts ("I say! What a day / When the babies crawled away.") and not very interesting. Charlie, on the other hand, found it immediately compelling for two reasons. The most important thing is that the book is written in second person, putting the child-reader in the role of the little boy saving the day ("Remember the way / You tried to save the day? / You hollered, 'HEY! / You babies, STAY!'"). Charlie becomes very excited, pointing to the silhouette of the boy and announcing, "That's me! That's Charlie!" and sometimes repeating the little boy's lines of dialogue. The repeated use of the word "remember" draws the child into the story even further, framing the whole thing as a retold story that happened to him personally just the other day.

The other thing Charlie loves about the text are all the exclamatory phrases he can add to his vocabulary: I say! What a day! Nice play! Okay! Hey, hey! He picked these up much faster than I expected.

The upshot is, I was skeptical at first, but this is definitely a worthy addition to our library.

Life-Size Aquarium and More Life-Size Zoo

This is just a brief update. In my post about Life-Size Zoo a few days ago, I mentioned the two sequels I had just discovered, More Life-Size Zoo and Life-Size Aquarium. These arrived from Amazon, and I want to report that: (1) these are just as awesome as the original, but (2) I would recommend them for a somewhat older age group.

Charlie loves the original Life-Size Zoo at under two and a half years old. Life-Size Aquarium scared him, and he ran away crying after seeing a few pages. Sea creatures just look weird, even the friendly ones like dolphins. More Life-Size Zoo isn't scary, but the fold-out pages are more extensive and I'm worried about the book getting damaged until he's able to handle it a bit more carefully. So these will go back on the shelf for at least six months, and probably more.

Nonetheless, the pictures are just as exciting as the original. I enjoyed looking through them myself, and I would certainly recommend these for 3- or 4-year olds.

Outside, Inside

Outside, Inside is a gem of a book, and sadly, out of print. Used copies are available on Amazon. I picked mine up at a garage sale, where I was told that it had been a favorite book in the seller's household when her kids were younger. Charlie enjoys it as well.

The book is about a thunderstorm that lasts a whole morning. One sentence and accompanying illustration describe what is happening outside, and the next sentence and illustration describe what is happening indoors in a little girl's house at the same time. The text is highly evocative of the sounds, textures, sights, even smells associated with a rainstorm and a day spent indoors. ("Outside, the rain spills from the clouds, shussh-wissh, shussh-wissh, shussh-wish. Inside, the clock ticks in the hall, tink-tunk, tink-tunk, tink-tunk. Outside, puddles bubble and churn with the falling rain. Inside, maple syrup slips down a pancake mountain.")

The illustrations are made of cut-paper and are very neat to look at. They feel both simple and complex at the same time -- simple in their use of few colors per item, but complex in the intricacy of the shapes that have been created. A number of animals make an appearance also--a cat inside, birds, frogs, and rabbits outside.

The entire book has a quiet, peaceful, natural, uplifting feel to it. The story is told with a minimum of words, and largely implied. This contributes to the quiet atmosphere that is created when reading it. The girl is not bored or unhappy that it's raining and she's stuck inside for the day. She simply finds indoor ways to amuse herself (playing marbles, baking cookies). When the storm ends, she is also happy to open the door and breathe the fresh air. I love books that can create a mood for their readers, and this book certainly does that.

Life-Size Zoo

Ever wondered exactly how big a koala is? Sure, you can go and see one at the zoo, but it's likely to be pretty far away and might be hiding or sleeping when you're there. For an up-close look, check out Life-Size Zoo: From Tiny Rodents to Gigantic Elephants, An Actual Size Animal Encyclopedia.

This book is a show-stopper. When they say life-size, they are not kidding. The book itself is gigantic, more than 14 inches by 10 inches, which is larger than any other book we own, including the large I Spy books you may be familiar with (post on that series forthcoming). Each page shows a photograph of a single animal in actual life size. Some are small enough to fit on a single two-page spread, like the aforementioned koala. Others feature just the head (panda, tiger). Still others have a full four-page foldout to showcase just the head (giraffe with her tongue sticking out).

The detail you can see in photographs this big is stunning. You can see gradations of color in a gorilla's fur, tiny spots on an aardvark's face, and the wrinkles around an elephant's eye. Detail-lovers will enjoy this book more than most.

The book includes a few facts about each species that is featured, and about the individual animal that is photographed. Our giraffe, for example, is a 6-year-old female named Lulu. The scientific name is listed, a few features of the photograph are pointed out in sidebar text, and some fun facts are listed as well ("Giraffes can gallop up to 35 miles an hour."). But the focus of this book is clearly on the pictures, not the textual information.

My only gripe about this book is the limited number of animals featured. There are only twenty. I wish they'd added a few more pages. Instead, they've gone the sequel route: I've just discovered More Life-Size Zoo: An All-New Actual-Size Animal Encyclopedia and Life-Size Aquarium on Amazon, and I'm ordering them right now!

Good Night, Gorilla

Good Night, Gorilla is an adorable little nearly-wordless book. A zookeeper walks through the zoo at night, saying goodnight to all the animals. ("Good night, [animal name]" are the only printed words.) Unbeknownst to him, the gorilla has stolen his keys, slipped out of his cage, and followed him around, letting out each animal after he says goodnight. The animals all follow the zookeeper home and curl up for the night in his bedroom. But the zookeeper's wife notices, and leads them all back to the zoo... except for the sneaky gorilla.

I think this was the first wordless book we got. I picked it up at a garage sale, and Charlie immediately fell in love with it, setting off a major phase of obsession with gorillas and monkeys. I'm not kidding when I say we probably read this fifteen times a day at one point.

I originally assumed that this story was decades old, for a couple of reasons. The style of drawing looks very classic 1950s, the house (and the wife in a nightgown and cap) also look very old-fashioned, and the zoo animals are kept in old-fashioned cages with bars, not at all like a modern zoo. But it turns out that it was written in 1994 and just stylized to look like the past. In any case, I will readily call this a modern classic.

The story has the potential to be very boring for adults, since it's repetitive and the illustration style is fine but not particularly gorgeous. But actually, there are a lot of "visual jokes" that you won't spot on the first (or third, or fifth) reading but that you'll notice in the background later. Just to give one example of the kind of thing I'm talking about, since I don't want to spoil it for you, the elephant has a Babar doll lying on the floor of his cage. Things like that. I always managed to notice a new one right when I was at the point of extreme aggravation at having to read the book "one more time" for Charlie.

Cute story, obsessive interest from child, and interest thrown in for the parents -- that all adds up to my highest recommendation.

We Are What We Eat!

In this lovely and engaging book, We Are What We Eat!, the children build a food sculpture in the shape of a person, using a selection of fruits and vegetables. The Amazon product description claims it's a board book, but it's actually not. It's a hardcover with cardstock pages, each of which folds out. When you turn to a page, you see one of the fruits or vegetables in its whole form. Fold out the page to reveal the insides cut into various interesting shapes! Things like pits, seeds, and peels are labeled.

This book has been a staple in our household for over a year. Charlie likes to announce the various foods as they appear, and marvels over the differences between the insides and outsides. This is the first book where he ever pretended to grab the foods off the page and eat them, something he now does whenever a food appears in any book, anywhere.

This is a great one. The photographs are creative and engaging, the fold-out pages are used effectively to make the outside/inside distinction, and there's a positive health message because of all the fruits and vegetables. Definitely a winner.

The Handiest Things in the World

The Handiest Things in the World is an intriguing compare-and-contrast book about using tools. The idea is that there are many things we can do with our hands, but we can do the same things more efficiently by using the proper tool for the job. Examples: Eat with your fingers, or with chopsticks. Shade your eyes with your hand, or with a hat. Mix dough with your hands, or with a mixer.

The concept of the book is very Montessori-friendly. Having the right materials for each task is key. It's also quite pretty -- an oversized full-color photograph illustrates each job done with the hands, and on the opposite page, done with the tool. Charlie loves it, even if he's a little bit too young to understand the underlying concept of the book.

I definitely recommend this book, but there are two things that I wish were a bit improved. First, all of the text of the book rhymes, but many of the rhymes are trite or fudged. ("Digging in and scooping down. Let's move lots of dirt around.") Second, not all of the hand-tool connections make a lot of sense. For example, chopsticks are a tool to help you eat, but how many small children actually can eat more efficiently with chopsticks than with their fingers? For another example, one page shows a child counting on his fingers, then using a calculator. I think at the ages this picture book would be interesting, most kids don't understand what a calculator does. Then again, other examples are much better, such as catching a butterfly in a net, and sweeping with a broom.

Despite those few reservations, I love this book. It's an interesting concept that I haven't seen in many (any?) other children's books, and Charlie always enjoys it.

The Lion & the Mouse

Charlie sometimes gets angry when I try to discuss a book with him, page by page, instead of reading the printed text. "Sing it, Mommy!" he demands.

To get around this problem, I went out and bought a bunch of picture books with no words. As soon as he figured out that there was no printed text to read, he became much more engaged in thinking through the stories himself.

The Lion & the Mouse, by Jerry Pinkney, is our favorite wordless book at the moment. The only words written on the pages are a few animal sounds: "Screech" for an owl and "Roar" for the lion and so forth. The watercolor paintings are so expressive that the well-known story is clearly told. Charlie and I talk about what happened and what will happen next as we turn the pages, and also about how the characters might be feeling. The pictures are also quite rich with detail in the backgrounds and the expressions of the animals. This book won the 2010 Caldecott Medal, and in my opinion, it was well deserved.

The story of the Lion & the Mouse is also a worthy one. It's a tale of unexpected friendship and repaying one good turn with another. These are lessons that I'm happy to teach to my son.