The Princess in Black and the Prince in Pink

 
 
The Princess in Black and the Prince in Pink
by Shannon Hale and Dean Hale
art by LeUyen Pham
Candlewick Press

2024
 

 

I visited some family recently, which included a chance to see my niece. Since my last visit, she's gotten a preference for longer books and series, as well as for princesses and other trappings of fantasy. She's especially fond of the Princess in Black series, so I decided to read one that caught my eye, The Princess in Black and the Prince in Pink.
 
The Princess in Black is basically a superhero. Whenever monsters show up to ruin things, Princess Magnolia slips away and puts on her costume, becoming the Princess in Black to fight them off. She has lots of other princess friends, who all have flower names and heroic alter egos, (probably accumulated over the course of the many books in the series preceding this one), and if I've understood correctly, none of them knows each others' secrets. They're more like superheroes than magic girls because they change into their costumes like any other set of clothes rather than having a transformation sequence. As far as I can tell, they have no powers, just the bravery to stand up to scary monsters and the athletic fitness to chase them off.
 
In this story, all the princesses have organized and are helping to run a spring festival, complete with rides, games, snacks, and the like, with the princesses operating all the booths. A rude emu shows up and creates a ruckus, kicking over stands, scaring all the kids in the crowd, smashing some decorations for the dance that Princess Magnolia brought. It's all very sudden and very public, so Magnolia has no opportunity for a costume change. Fortunately, Prince Valerian is attending too, and he manages to simply push the emu back outside and bar the gate.
 
Magnolia is sad about her decorations, but she's visited by the Prince in Pink, a hero who specializes in throwing parties rather than fighting monsters. (This is very obviously Valerian in costume, but Magnolia never suspects.) The prince helps her salvage the remaining decorations and set up for the evening's festival dance. The decorating sequence is illustrated in much the same way I suspect the monster fights usually are, as a montage of dramatic moments.
 
The dance is a success, but the emu comes back with two ostrich sidekicks. The birds can't talk, so none of the princesses know what they want, but the narration grants them enough interiority to reveal that they're equally fond of kicking things and dancing. The lights go out, and literally all the princesses change costumes to produce a team of like a dozen heroes ready to defend the party. The Prince in Pink is there too - he decorates the birds and restarts the music, and instead of fighting everyone dances, leading to a happy ending for all.
 
As far as I can tell, the Prince in Pink is the first costumed boy in a series that's primarily about showing little girls that they can be a princess sometimes and a tomboy others, they don't have to choose between tea parties and rough-and-tumble play. 
 
It seems notable to me that what appears to be a popular series has included a book introducing a character that at least some parents are going to read as gay. But aside from his pink costume and his love of parties and decor, Valerian isn't otherwise coded as gay. There's a long tradition of artists indicating to audiences that a guy is intended to be seen as queer without anyone saying a word or showing him involved in romance. In the past, I'm certain Valerian would've been queer-coded, if he was introduced at all. But I didn't see any of those techniques in use here. Valerian isn't feminine or campy, he's not a sissy or coward. He fights the emu without any hesitation, but dressing as the Prince in Pink lets him do what he really likes, just like dressing as the Princess in Black gives Magnolia the chance to be a hero.

In the Half Room

 
 
In the Half Room

by Carson Ellis
Candlewick Press

2020

 

 

In the Half Room is a children's picture book by Carson Ellis about an odd but still cozy cottage, that seems well-suited for a bedtime story. In the author's note at the end, Ellis says the idea for the book came from one of her children (though the child is somewhat unsettled by the way Ellis implemented it).
 
The half room is a place for impossible objects, a room of half-things. There's the right half of a person, the front half of a cat, the back half of a pair of shoes, and so on. Everything is fine, just halved. The text is simple and has a sing-song rhyme. Like in Goodnight Moon, we're introduced to objects individually, and then they're placed in the context of the room.
 

 
Once the scene is set, the half room gets a couple visitors. First, the left half of the young woman (who maybe looks a bit like Ellis herself). The two half-women go outside to dance together, and eventually recombine into a whole person. Then, the back half of the cat arrives. The two half-cats tussle and spat; they don't merge, but do eventually settle down to nap together. I think this is the detail that disturbed Ellis's kid, but it feels like authentic cat behavior.
 
This is a short, gentle little book with narration to lull you to sleep and imagery that feels like it comes from a dream. 

There's a Tiger on the Train

 
 
There's a Tiger on the Train

by Mariesa Dulak

art by Rebecca Cobb

Faber & Faber
2024 

 

 

There's a Tiger on the Train is a cute children's picture book about a little boy entertaining himself with his imagination while he and his dad ride the train to the beach. Dad is on his phone, and won't do more than glance up from it until the train arrives, which means our young protagonist will have to amuse himself.
 
Which he does! He imagines a tiger in a top hat, crocodiles just back from a swim, playful piglets, tea-drinking hippos, pugs in glamorous dresses... In the end, the train reaches the beach, and he gets what he wants most off, a chance to play with his dad, who gives him his full attention now that they're there.
 
I imagine a lot of kids can relate to a parent who's not really paying attention because they're on their phone, and everyone has had times when they're bored and have to entertain themselves. Long trips where you're a passenger are a perfect time to daydream. And dad comes through in the end! Which doesn't always happen in real life, so I was kind of relieved that things worked out here. I guess I shouldn't really be surprised a kids' book had a happy ending, but I'm still glad it did.
 
The text of the book is written in 4-line stanzas with A-B-C-B rhyming structure. There's some neat typography where changes in the font or text size herald the arrival of a new set of animals or give voice to the train's rattles and clanks. The art reminds me of a kid's color pencil drawings, which I'm sure is a deliberate effect, because it encourages young readers to try out the same style. I also think it's worth mentioning that the boy in the book is Black and his dad is White. The Snowy Day is great, but it's only one book; There's a Tiger on the Train gives children of color another opportunity to see themselves portrayed in a very relatable, universal kind of story.

Invisible Things

 
 
Invisible Things

by Andy Pizza and Sophie Miller

Chronicle Books

2023 

 

 

Invisible Things is a children's picture book that illustrates things that can't be seen - experiences from our other senses and our emotions. 

 

The book is a kind of guided meditation for kids, first walking through things we might hear, smell, taste, or feel, and then asking the reader to close their eyes and take some time to identify the invisible sensations around themselves. And then this is repeated for emotions, with a bit of extra attention given to reassuring kids that sadness and fear are normal, but also not permanent. 

 

The illustrations use cute little personifications to depict each invible thing. The song stuck in your head is a guitar with feet and googly eyes; the heebie jeebies is a hollow tree stump with little eyes peeking out of it. I think the idea is that making each sensation or emotion into a tiny monster makes them easier to think about and imagine.

Petra

 

Petra

by Marianna Coppo

Tundra Books

2018

 

 

Petra is a children's picture book about a little rock with a big imagination. I got it as a present for my sister, who's recommended me so many of the kids' books I've enjoyed. This one is intended for pretty young readers, and might help encourage them to dream widely about what sort of person they'd like to become.
 
When we first meet Petra, she tells us she's a mountain. She boasts about her history, her might. But then! a perspective shift. A dog fetching a stick spots Petra and picks her up instead. The human, annoyed, tosses Petra into a tree, where she lands in a bird's nest. Now Petra imagines she's an egg. She hopes to hatch into a dragon, a penguin, a platypus. (A good conversation starter, I think.) The bird returns and drops Petra in a pond. Now she imagines she's a mighty island. A different human comes by and picks Petra up again. But this time, she's brought home, painted to look like an elephant, and given a place of honor. Petra is surprised, but happy.
 
Coppo narrates the book from the little rock's perspective. We see that she really believes in each new idea she tells us. I like the detail that the rock is named Petra, like the ancient city carved directly into the stone of cliff faces, like the Greek prefix petro- for things related to stones. Coppo's illustrations are watercolor. They also center Petra's perspectives, bringing each of her imaginings to life, and showing her at a scale that matches her current role - filling the page as a mountain, tiny compared the bird or humans or dog.

The Three Astronauts

 
 
The Three Astronauts

by Umberto Eco 

art by Eugenio Carmi

translated by William Weaver

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

1989

  

 Did you know that Umberto Eco write a children's book? Yes, the author of Foucault's Pendulum and The Name of the Rose and the famous essay describing the features of fascism, that Umberto Eco wrote a children's picture book near the end of the Cold War called The Three Astronauts, about representatives from America, Russia, and China traveling to Mars.
 
The three countries each want to be the first to put a person on Mars. Their three separate rockets launch around the same time, and land on Mars almost simultaneously. The astronauts discover a planet covered with canals, blue plants, and vibrant alien birds, perhaps inspired by Tweel from Stanley Weinbaum's classic story "A Martian Odyssey." Eco's depiction of the space programs is scifi of course, because we couldn't and didn't go to Mars in 1989, but it's fairly realistic. His depiction of Mars itself is more fanciful, the sort of thing that was common a half-century before, that fell out of favor as scifi authors sought to incorporate discoveries made by real-world space programs.
 
Eco's three astronauts, each speaking their own language, initially don't understand each other, and don't trust each other. Then night falls. The astronauts feel lonely, homesick, perhaps a bit frightened in this strange place. The American calls out "Mommy!" The Russian calls out "Mamouchka!" The Chinese astronaut calls out "Mama!" And even though they're still speaking different languages, they each recognize that the others are feeling the same way. (Thank you, proto-Indo-European language group, for retaining that bit of commonality!)
 
Next the astronauts see a Martian. It has green skin, six arms, a trunk and other strange features. At first the astronauts are all afraid. They think the Martian is a monster and want to destroy it. Then a baby bird falls from a tree and looks hurt. Each of the astronauts feels sad and sheds a tear. The Martian exhales blue smoke and goes to pick up the baby bird. The astronauts recognize the smoke as akin to a tear, and they see that the Martian cares about the bird. On the basis of this beginning of mutual understanding, they're able to become friends.
 
The art in The Three Astronauts is a mix of collage and watercolor. Eugenio Carmi depicts the Earth using a map of the globe, but Mars is a blue-grey watercolor circle. Each astronaut is depicted as a scrap of paper. The Chinese astronaut is a large character, and looks to me like a logo. The Russian is a scrap of a newsletter printed on red paper. The American is a Chiclets wrapper, which amuses me. The alien bird is an engraving, watercolored in pinks and purples. The Martian is assembled from several engravings. I suspect the six-armed torso came from an illustration of the sort of people Greek philosophers imagined living in other parts of the world, which is a nice touch if so.
 
I wish peace really were as simple as Eco makes it seem here, although I think his point that we need to recognize each other as sharing common emotions and experiences is sound. And I think it helps that, by caring for the injured bird, each is able to demonstrate their benign intent. While misunderstandings can happen, even among people who speak the same language, if you're approaching each other in a spirit of equality and cooperation, you're already halfway there. So much conflict comes from one person, or one group, trying to dominate another. The conflict is inherent in the approach; no amount of understanding will make it go away. What's required is for the aggressor to renounce their attempts at domination, and to seek peace through equality instead.

The Runaway Road

 
 
The Runaway Road

by Stan Mack

Parents Magazine Book Club

1980 

 

 

When I was a kid, my parents had a subscription to the Parents Magazine Book Club. By the time my sister and I were too old for them, we'd built up quite a collection. I didn't keep most of them, and recently, when I was going through a box of kids' books I'd kept, my goal was to pare down further. But The Runaway Road by Stan Mack is still kind of nice, so I'm still keeping it.
 
Every year, the family goes on their two-week summer vacation to the mountains, taking good old Route 100. It's a sign of the times, I guess, that this seems like absurd luxury to me, but was probably meant to be unremarkable and relatable to the typical PMBC subscriber.
 
Anyway, this year, the road itself seems to have other ideas, and goes on a detour, taking the family in their car along for the ride. What follows is what I've come to recognize as a typical children's book plot structure. As the road scoots along its way, it crosses paths with various people who get caught up in things and have to follow along to the destination - a woman whose line-drying laundry gets caught on the family station wagon, a farmer whose pig stands on the hood, a hotdog seller who needs to get paid for lunch, police who want to know what all the fuss is about.
 
Eventually, the road gets where it's going - the beach! The end of the road enjoys feeling the lapping of the waves. Everyone gets their stuff back, and the family decides to go ahead and vacation at the beach instead. Apparently, Route 100 will do this for two weeks a year from now on, but still go up to the mountains the rest of the time.
 
It's not some deep or profound story, but it's one of the few Parents Magazine books I could've described for you, even before rereading it.

The Christmas Book Flood

 
 
The Christmas Book Flood

by Emily Kilgore

art by Kitty Moss

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2022

 

 

The Christmas Book Flood was a recommendation from my sister, who's something of a one-woman book flood herself! It's a children's picture book about an Icelandic tradition that, in recent years, has been adopted by booklovers in America. I'd heard of the tradition before (probably from NPR), but didn't know much about it, beyond that it offered a justification for Christmas book-buying.
 
Emily Kilgore's text spends a lot of time building anticipation, but not much describing what this tradition actually is. We learn that the book flood is coming, people are eagerly awaiting it, they're so excited they can hardly contain it, they make one last trip to the bookstore right beforehand, and then finally exchange books and settle down to read together. I think Kilgore captures the feelings a kid might have before a holiday, but I wish she'd given a bit more information amidst the mood setting.
 
In Kilgore's author's note at the end, we learn that the tradition dates back to WWII, when the rationing in Iceland was pretty severe, and books were one of the few pleasures people could get ahold of. To save money on printing costs, publishers there did all their printing for the year between October and December, so all the new books for the year came out then. Readers would stock up then, and the book flood became part of the Christmas tradition, staying up late reading on Christmas Eve. I realize that, as an adult, the author's note is addressed to me in a way that the rest of the book isn't, but I found that history way more fascinating than just the assertion that it's winter, so the book flood is coming soon.
 
Kitty Moss's illustrates the book with jewel-toned pastels, showing a large multiracial extended family making preparations, with the kids getting center-page. As the story continues, more and more elements of each drawing look like book covers or like paper with writing on it, which I thought was a nice effect. Also at the end, we see it's really just the kids who stay up reading, while all the adults fall asleep in the living room with open books in their laps, which is a fun visual treat for the young readers.

I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail

 
 
I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail

art by Ramsingh Urveti

Tara Books

2012

 

 

Ramsingh Urveti only credits himself as the illustrator of I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail, perhaps because the text of the book consists of only the title poem, a folk poem from England in the 1600s, and according to the preface, often included in collections of poetry for children. Urveti's version takes the form of a children's picture book, and the poem is simple enough to be enjoyed by children; but I think adults can enjoy this as well.
 
The poem's first few lines go like this:
"I saw a peacock with a fiery tail
I saw a comet drop down hail
I saw a cloud with ivy circled around..."
 
Read this way, it's a series of strange images. But the poem's 'trick' is that it can be read another way, no longer rhyming, but making perfect sense.
"I saw a peacock

With a fiery tale, I saw a comet
Drop down hail, I saw a cloud..."
 
Urveti's art allows both readings at once. Each two-page has one of his black-and-white ink drawings, and a half-stanza of text. Each also has a hole in the paper that reveals the next half-stanza. So it reads more like this:
"I saw a peacock with a fiery tail
With a fiery tail, I saw a comet
I saw a comet drop down hail
Drop down hail, I saw a cloud
I saw a cloud with ivy circled around..."
 
At the beginning, the cut-outs only show text, but as the book continues, they reveal glimpses of art too, and the cut-outs themselves become an increasingly important part of each new drawing.
 
I don't know why, exactly, but this book feels very appropriate for the Solstice and New Year. Perhaps the images of darkness, of lights in the sky, perhaps the way the dual readings suggest transformation.

The Real Dada Mother Goose

 
The Real Dada Mother Goose

A Treasury of Complete Nonsense

by Jon Scieszka
art by Julia Rothman

adapted from the book illustrated by Blanche Fisher Write

Candlewick Press

1916, adapted 2022

 

 

Like many of the children's books I read, The Real Dada Mother Goose was recommended by my sister, and I'm really glad I listened to her!
 
I had a copy of the book this one is based on, growing up, a black-and-white checkerboard hardback of The Real Mother Goose, illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright, originally published in 1916. It's been a long time since I've read Jon Scieszka, who you might remember from The Stinky Cheese Man or The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, but what he's produced here is wonderful. It's both a playful expression of human creativity, and hopefully an inspiration to kids to remixing something they like to create something new.
 
The book has six main chapters, plus a section of notes at the end. Each chapter has a reprint of the first verse of a nursery rhyme, and then six variations on it. Each variation is like a little game, applying a specific procedure to the text to change it in a specific way. There are chapters for 'Humpty Dumpty,' 'Jack be Nimble,' 'Old Mother Hubbard,' 'Hey Diddle Diddle,' 'Hickory Dickory Dock,' and 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.'
 
I'm pretty sure the variations include actual Dada tricks and games, as well as others that Scieszka added. In many of the games, words are put in some kind of code, Morse, pig latin, a rebus, the Military Alphabet, simplified Egyptian hieroglyphics. Sometimes there are substitutions, using the same rhyme scheme with new words. In others, the whole form is changed, creating a haiku, a pop quiz, a comic strip.
 
The notes section explains some of the more complex games so that child-readers will have the instructions they need to try making their own variations. They also give some history of Mother Goose, and dada, and they explicitly confirm that - like cartoonist Matt Madden - Scieszka was inspired by Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style. I think this could be a great resource for someone who wants to cultivate their own creativity, but could use a little help getting started.
 
Whenever the original text of the rhymes is repeated, it appears in black, while new words are printed in blue. Artist Julia Rothman has a bit of drawing depicting dada geese hard at work remaking the rhymes, but a lot of what she's done here is to collage and modify the original images, breaking them up, rearranging their parts, adding something new - exactly the same way Scieszka does with the text. Again, it could easily inspire kids to add to existing drawing as a way to get started on their own art.
 
I probably want a copy of The Real Dada Mother Goose for myself, and if you have a creative child, you probably want it for them too.

Imelda and the Goblin King

 
 
Imelda and the Goblin King

by Briony May Smith

Flying Eye Books

2015

 

 

Imelda and the Goblin King is a children's picture book that retells an older fairy tale in a way that seems an awful lot like a modern political allegory. I didn't really care for this one! The reasons for that probably have more to do with me, and with when I read it, than they do with what Briony Smith has written and drawn. But so be it; right now I don't know how to give Imelda a fair reading.
 
Imelda is a human girl. She lives in a house on the edge of the forest, and spends all day every day in the forest playing with the fairies and the Fairy Queen. One day, the Goblin King comes stomping into the woods with all his little goblins, declares that he owns everything, kicks some fairies, and generally makes an un-ignorable nuisance of himself. The Fairy Queen invites him to a shared banquet to smooth tensions. He eats everything, then kidnaps her and locks her in a cage.
 
The fairies go to Imelda and beg her for help. She bakes a magic pie that's half safe and half poison, and offers to share a (safe) slice with him if he'll release the Fairy Queen. Predictably, the Goblin King steals the pie from Imelda, eats the whole thing, and turns into a worm. Without the king, all the little goblins become friends with the fairies, and everyone lives happily ever after, except for the very angry, bossy worm.
 
Like I said, this feels like a parable. You've got a woman politician going up against a shouting megalomaniac who wants everyone to pay attention to him, who wants to own everything, control everyone, who wants to lock up women in cages. Smith published this in 2015, thus probably wrote it in 2014, and also probably wasn't making the overt parallels to American politics that seem so obvious now.
 
As a political fable, I hate it. It's too simplistic - which, I know, is laughable criticism of a kids' book, but still. Everyone is happy and gets along until the Goblin King arrives. The moment he's gone, they do again, with absolutely no conflict between the fairies and the goblins. And how do you get rid of an opposing politician you don't like? Imelda's answer is, effectively, assassination.
 
But even as a kids' book with no larger implications, I don't like this. The message that it's important to stand up to bullies instead of appeasing them is sound, but I kind of don't think you should encourage kids to poison their enemies - a real thing it is actually possible for them to do! 'But if he hadn't stolen the poisoned food, he wouldn't have gotten sick' is typical kid logic, and may even appeal to some adult sense of fairness, but I assure you our legal system doesn't see it that way.
 

I had the same complaint about the movie Brave. Merida is justified in not wanting an arranged marriage. But her solution is to find a witch, buy poison from her, and then use that poison on her mother. For all she knows, the poison will kill her! That's usually what it does! And, she leaves the leftover poison out, where her three little brothers can find it, eat it, and, again, as far as Merida knows, be killed by it. And she is the hero of the picture! The film treats her actions as totally appropriate!
 
Look, I know that what to do about a bully politician who runs on a platform of hurting everyone who doesn't vote for him is a complex question, and that as an adult, I shouldn't be looking to a picture book for answers. But a kid might! And while I don't expect any children's book to avoid simplification, I'd hope for one whose answers aren't quite so insipid. 'Just kill him, and then he won't be around anymore' isn't a good answer for a number of reasons, among them, it's not really practical or actionable.
 
Two of my favorite superheroes are Word Girl and Squirrel Girl, because they both address the question, what do you do about a bad guy, besides just be stronger than him and beat him up?
 
Squirrel Girl is probably better known. She had an ongoing Marvel comic series for awhile. About half the time, she uses her strength to simply stop the villain from whatever they're doing so she can talk with them, find out why they're rampaging, and see if they could be redirected to some more constructive activity instead. The rest of the time, talking doesn't work, but neither does simply being super strong and having the powers of a squirrel. To win, she needs a coalition, both other superhero allies, and reformed supervillains she previously talked to and made friends with.
 
Word Girl is probably less well known. She has a PBS kids' show that I used to watch all the time in grad school when I couldn't fall asleep. She's super strong, flies, and officially, her shtick is that she teaches you several vocabulary words every episode. And sometimes her villains are just wacky guys like The Butcher, who buries you under a pile of lunchmeat so you're immobilized while he robs you. But sometimes, she faces off against an evil businessman who uses mass hypnosis in his advertising to get people to buy his worthless products and/or revere him. Sometimes she faces an elderly woman who uses a 'sweet old grandmother' routine to trick people into helping her with her crimes. And in those cases, Word Girl can't win just by flying fast or punching hard. She has to convince the public that a crime has been committed at all, show them how they've been fooled, persuade them to turn against the villain. So she's not just teaching vocabulary, she's teaching critical thinking.

 

These stories are still simplified, but they're not simplistic. They model, at an interpersonal level, what you need to do when you can't win just by being physically strong. And one benefit to this, is that this kind of organizing is fractal - the same actions need to be repeated at several scales. Because a mass movement isn't just a gathering of millions of unaffiliated individuals. It's not even an organization made up of organizations - it's a coalition of coalitions. 

 

Organizing a mass protest is a lot like putting together a holiday parade. Yes, you invite everyone you can to show up and join the audience (and the audience absolutely is a part of the event) but the core of the event is made up of pre-existing groups, which normally meet separately and each do their own thing, cooperating on a shared goal. The bridge work connecting group to group and collection-of-groups to collection-of-groups is important, but so is the work of building and maintaining each of the individual teams and clubs. And practicing at the interpersonal level is how you learn to make connections between groups. Cooperating with friends is both an excellent first step, and a guide to what you should do next.

 
Is it fair to hold Imelda and the Goblin King to this standard? No, absolutely not. I ought to engage with it on its own terms, rather than imposing judgment based on American politics a decade after it was written and my own idiosyncratic test for the 'right' way to teach kids how to handle conflict. But that's where I'm at. Right now, I don't know how to be fair.

Beautiful Useful Things

 
Beautiful Useful Things

What William Morris Made

by Beth Kephart

art by Melodie Stacey

Abrams

2022

 

 

Beautiful Useful Things is a children's picture book and a biography of the Victorian polymath William Morris, though it's very light on biographical detail.
 
Today, most people who recognize that name probably know Morris for his detailed patterns, which are still used on wallpapers and rugs. But Kephart focuses on Morris's love of nature and his work designing and handmaking a variety of goods, especially books. Rather than trying to reproduce Morris's dense patterns, Stacey uses similar natural motifs, but paints them big and loose, with a lot of negative space.
 
More than anything else, I think this book is trying to capture how Morris thought about things, and encourage young readers to adopt that mindset, at least for the length of the book. We learn about Morris's close observation of nature, and his desire to preserve artisan production in the face of industrialization. The cadence of Kephart's text, and the way the paragraphs are spread across the pages encourages slow reading.
 
The author's note mentions that Morris was an environmentalist and a founder of the Arts & Crafts movement in England, both of which show up clearly in this book. He was also a socialist, although I think you'd be hard pressed to guess that just from this book. The one-paragraph author's note also contains more historical detail about Morris than the entire rest of the book.
 
Stacey's watercolor art demonstrates the idea of reproducing natural images, and they're accentuated by images of knights and princesses, which reference the kinds of stories Kephart says Morris loved to read and to write himself. Fittingly, the font of this book is very pretty.
 
There is an irony, I suppose, to the way that Morris's drawings have become something else that's mass produced. His philosophy isn't dead, but it also isn't enacted nearly as much as he'd like, and his name is associated less with the content of his ideas than with the appearance of specific patterns. This book depicts Morris hand printing and sewing hardbacks of his own text - but is itself produced in the usual way. I wonder if any young readers will notice that disconnect?

How to Make Friends with a Ghost

 

How to Make Friends with a Ghost

by Rebecca Green

Tundra Books

2017

 

 

How to Make Friends with a Ghost is a children's picture book, but at almost 50 pages, it's longer than these books often are. In the style of an instruction book, complete with pun-filled fake citations and references to other works, author Rebecca Green explains how to find, befriend, and care for a ghost, and discusses the benefits of such friendship.
 
What Green describes sounds a bit like having a pet, or an imaginary friend. I don't necessarily think it would help a child missing a deceased relative - though I could be wrong. I think it would appeal most to a kid who likes spooky stuff or is curious about death in a more abstract and less personal way.
 
Green's art is pastel crayon against a white background, so that it looks reminiscent of children's art. She uses a restricted palette of black, browns, greys, and taupes, and red. The ghost is a classic bedsheet ghost - she both warns against mistaking another kid in a costume for a potential ghost friend and recommends trick-or-treating as a fun activity your ghost can enjoy. The child protagonist of the book is a girl whose face often looks intently interested, but never scared.

The Planet in a Pickle Jar

 

The Planet in a Pickle Jar

by Martin Stanev

Flying Eye Books

2022

 

 

The Planet in a Pickle Jar is a children's picture book about a couple kids staying with their grandmother. Initially they're bored, but then warm up to her. The book is playful about the space between what the words say and what the pictures show. And while the title image is obviously a metaphor, it's not one with a straightforward interpretation.
 
The text in this book adopts the kids' perspective; the art, I think, shows their grandmother's. So we're told that her house is boring, her stories are too long, and she spends all her time sewing and making pickles. What we see is a tableau that rewards a closer look.
 
The house is full of interesting-looking knickknacks and tchotchkes. The word-bubble showing the grandmother's story appears to illustrate the big bang and formation of the solar system. And her pickle jars aren't full of pickles, but of tiny images representing sights and memories from her travels. Kids who like to stop and spot all the details on the page will have a lot to look at here.
 
The grandmother tells another story, (again shown as an illustrated word bubble,) about how we are wrecking the environment and it won't still be there to enjoy if we do. Then, in the night, the kids wake up and discover she's missing. They search the whole house, then find a secret passage that leads to a tunnel that leads to a secret second basement where the grandmother keeps all her pickle jars, lots more than we saw earlier. She'd gotten tangled up in her own knitting, so the kids 'rescue' her pretty easily. But they are awestruck by the sight, and decide to get off their phones, touch grass, and join her in filling pickle jars.
 
I feel like I would've liked this book as a kid. Even today, I dream all the time of a giant version of my childhood home, with extra high ceilings, bookshelves like libraries, an attic like an airplane hanger, a basement like a dungeon, and everywhere cardboard boxes of interesting stuff, and tunnels or secret staircases connecting it all. It's part of why I like the film Inception, and playing D&D. And while the art isn't Where's Waldo or Find Freddie level detailed, there's still a lot going on that, when I was younger especially, I'd have liked poring over, admiring, and noticing new things.
 
As an adult, the one thing I find confusing is the grandmother's story about pollution and deforestation. Because the pickle jars seem like they represent photos or memories. One has a tiny sun in it, another a tree, another a leopard. So is her advice basically 'gather ye rosebuds while ye may?' Like, get out there and enjoy this stuff now, kids, cause it won't still be here when you're older? That seems a little bleak!
 
Or is this intended as an environmentalist message? But if so, 'saving' the memory of something is very different than saving the thing itself. Whatever essence of leopard you're preserving in whatever thing the glass jar is a metaphor for won't do anything to help the real live leopard itself. So while I know my kid self would've liked this, my adult brain kind of gets hung up on the logic of it.

I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew

 

I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew

by Dr Seuss

Random House

1965

 

 

When I read The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, it reminded me vaguely of Dr Seuss's I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew, which was one of my favorites of his as a kid, so I decided to reread it. I have no idea if Suess ever read Lovecraft, but even if he did, I doubt this was any sort of direct homage or inspiration. There are similarities because both tell stories about journeys, and both contain a few common elements - a distant city, cats, a vast underground - but Solla Sollew is its own story, not a retlling of Kadath.
 
The unnamed narrator of Solla Sollew is a young man who feels beset by troubles. He makes rules for himself, to try to prevent the same things happening again, but there's always something new. And so, he is tempted when a traveler promises to take him along to a golden city where he'll be troubled no more.
 
But along the way, he meets other people who have troubles of their own that they're running away from. The traveler hooks the boy with his promise, then makes him do all the work. An old man moves from home to escape the rain. A general conscripts the boy into his army, then runs off and leaves him alone at the first sign of danger.
 
When he gets to the fabled city, they have problems too, and the first person he meets wants to run off to a new city that'll surely be better. So at last the boy stops to consider, and goes home, and instead of trying to avoid every possible form of trouble, plans to confront and overcome them.
 
Parts of this remind me of very old style D&D. First the boy trips on a rock, so then he always looks down as he walks. Then he gets bitten by a bird from behind, so he teaches himself to be wall-eyed. Then he gets attacked from above and below... It's just like descriptions of the oldest D&D games, where the players developed elaborate lists of routine instructions for each time their characters entered a new room, trying to avoid every single bad thing that'd ever befallen them from surprising them again, and the Dungeon Master constantly innovating new and more obscure punishments for failing to say the magic words "...and I also look at X." There's even a tiny monster who lives in a keyhole and pushes your key out of the lock!
 
Most of my favorite Seuss books were like children's bestiaries - If I Ran the Circus, If I Ran the Zoo, On Beyond Zebra, McElligot's Pool. Several of those are out of print now, because the conceit of each relied on fantastic exoticism that sometimes incorporated real-world orientalism and racism. A little boy dream of greatness, because he alone will go out and come home with animals from other parts of the world, imaginary animals from imaginary places, that he's able to believe might be real partly just because he's young, and partly because these places are in parts of the world he knows little about, so the imaginary spots seem no more unreal than what's actually there. It's no coincidence he dreams of animals from made-up parts of Asia and Africa, not a fantastic unmapped bit of the American Midwest.
 
Solla Sollew and another one I liked, The Butter Battle Book, are different, because they're ultimately warnings about the dangers of choosing fantasy over reality, of imagining that you can be rid of your problems without solving them, just one town over or one new toy away. Both are, in a way, more mature works, because they still star a dreamer, but they show that his dreams don't work out simply because he hopes they will, and who ultimately decides to stop dreaming and take action, to do something real. That's one last similarity to Dream-Quest, I suppose, because in that Randolph Carter finally chooses to wake up and to live, rather than dying in his sleep trying to capture a dream.

The Wolf's Secret

 
 

The Wolf's Secret

by Myriam Dahman and Nicolas Digard

art by Julia Sarda

Orchard Books

2020

 

 

The Wolf's Secret is another children's picture book I picked up for the chance to see Julia Sarda's art. Once again, authors Myriam Dahman and Nicolas Digard remix elements of folk lore and fable to tell a new story that feels like it could be from long ago.

In the woods lives the biggest wolf. Every day he hunts, and every other creature in the forest fears him. The wolf likes to go to the edge of a clearing and listen to a human woman sing. She lives in a cabin in the clearing, and sings for her father, who is sick.

One day the singing stops. The wolf keeps returning to the clearing, but the woman doesn't start up again. He doesn't know what to do. Then, the wolf catches a rabbit, who promises to do him a favor if he'll let it go. He does, and the rabbit turns into a wizard. He sets the wolf on a path that will lead him back to the woman.

The wolf follows the path, and ends up with a magic bell he can wear around his neck. It allows him to speak the human language. He goes back to the cabin in the clearing and speaks to the woman while standing behind her. She says she can't sing because she's sad since her father died. The wolf offers to be her companion and keep her company, if she'll sing for him, and if she'll promise to never turn around to see him...

You might guess what happened, but Dahman and Digard find a way to give us a happy ending. The rabbit who becomes a wizard reminds me of one of Aesop's fables. The larger structure of the book resembles Japanese and European legends about shapeshifting animal and fairy spouses, what we might call 'selkie stories,' (following Sophia Samatar,) even when they're not about seal-women specifically. But in those stories, the price of curiosity is abandonment. This tale is much gentler.

This is an earlier example of Sarda's art than I've seen before. Her style is perfectly consistent, but I think in some of the later books, her compositions are livelier, and she finds more opportunities for embellishment. Here the pictures themselves are a bit simpler, even if each figure or background is no less detailed. The wizard with his beard of autumn leaves is a standout, and the other forest creatures reacting with surprise when the wolf puts on the bell is excellent.

The Skull

 
 

The Skull

A Tyrolean Fable

by Jon Klassen

Candlewick Press

2023 

 

 

The Skull is the most recent kids' book by Jon Klassen. It's his take on a folk tale. As a joke, I might describe it as the Halloween version of I Want My Hat Back, but actually, I think the superficial spookiness of the skull imagery hides a more serious underlying darkness. Klassen's use of parallelism and subtext gives this brief tale a depth I wasn't expecting.

The story opens with a girl, Otilla, running through the forest, running away from home. She goes into the deepest, oldest part of the forest, and finds an ancient manor house. She knocks and asks to be let in. She's tired and needs a place to stay. She doesn't want the people who might be following her to find her. She doesn't want to go home, ever. Otilla is answered by a talking human skull, who lets her in once she agrees to carry him.

Otilla carries the skull as he gives her a tour of the house. It's clear he enjoys the company. By the end of the day, they might be friends. Otilla gets ready for bed, and tucks the skull in next to her. He warns her that every night, a headless skeleton enters the house, demands the skull, chases the skull, tries to capture it. So far the skull has always stayed away, but he's afraid. He doesn't want to be caught, ever. Otilla promises to protect him.

In the middle of the night, the headless skeleton appears and shouts for the skull in a booming voice. Otilla is barely able to keep her friend away. They're chased all over the house.

Then Otilla finds a way to get the upper hand. She incapacitates the skeleton, and tucks the skull back into bed. Then she systematically and vehemently destroys the skeleton. She returns to bed and assures the skull that the skeleton won't be back. He invites her to stay with him in the house, and she agrees.

We never explicitly learn what Otilla was running away from, only that she's afraid of being made to go back, and that she's happy to start a new life with her new friend. I think Otilla sees the skull as a kindred spirit. There's an obvious similarity between her situation and his desire to not be reconnected to the skeleton.

The ferocity of Otilla's violence against the skeleton is almost shocking, even for a fairy tale. It shows the strength of her emotion. It seems to symbolize what she'd like to do to whatever she's running away from. (Did Otilla also fear someone much larger coming in the middle of the night to pull her from bed?)

I don't know if kids will pick up on the implications here, or if that subtext will only be visible to adult readers. But I suspect they'll notice, at least, that the story is somewhat deeper than its surface, that Otilla's actions show she feels more than her placid face lets on. The friendship here seems strange, but it's based on an underlying similarity and mutual respect that goes beyond appearances.
 
Klassen's art is deceptively simple. If you've seen his other books, his style is instantly recognizable. He works in block shapes and speckled colors, and finds a way to include more emotional nuance than seems like should be possible. For most of the book, Otilla seems worried but displaying a calm she doesn't feel. When she destroys the skeleton, she has a kind of satisfied determination.

Leina and the Lord of the Toadstools

 

Leina and the Lord of the Toadstools 

by Myriam Dahman and Nicolas Digard
art by Julia Sarda
Orchard Books
2022

 

I really love Julia Sarda's art, and I'm hoping to read a couple more books she's illustrated this year. First up is Leina and the Lord of the Toadstools, an children's book that blends aspects of European fairy tale and American tall tale to tell a new story that has an uncanny feeling of being familiar and old.
 
Leina is the ferry woman for a small town on the bank of a river 'out west.' Every morning, Leina boats people across the river to the forest to chop wood and forage, and every evening she boats them home. Leina has a crush on Oren, who is kind to her, but she's too shy to talk when she's around him.
 
One evening, Oren isn't there to catch the ferry home, and doesn't return the next day either. This isn't the first time someone's disappeared this way. There's a storm, and Leina goes across to look for him, but instead meets a man-sized toad wearing a suit. He introduces himself as Mr Spadefoot, the Lord of the Toadstools. Leina takes him to town to do business, but the townspeople drive him off. Leina boats him back to the forest, and he invites her to his house for dinner.
 
At Mr Spadefoot's house, Leina discovers that he's been turning townspeople into animals and keeping them in cages. She realizes he means to do the same to her. If she wants to save Oren, and herself, she'll have to find a way to get the better of him...
 
Mr Spadefoot is a pretty good villain! In a few short pages, he reminds me of Bluebeard, Rumpelstiltskin, even the Devil making trades over fiddle contests at the crossroads. There are also themes of hospitality, and a sense that while the townspeople don't deserve exactly what's happening to them, they do need to do better, both to the forest and to any visitors they receive. We don't learn a lot about Leina, but she gathers her courage when she needs to, and remains curious and clever, even in the face of a monster who scares her.
 
Sarda's art is delightful. The forest scenes are full of detail, Mr Spadefoot's house appropriately strange and maze-like. Some of the smaller pictures are framed in boxes where Sarda has used repeating patterns on the edges, which gives those images an older, storybook feel.

A Small Miracle

 
 

A Small Miracle

by Peter Collington 

Knopf

1997

 

 

I'm visiting relatives for the holidays, and my little niece has a current favorite book. At her request, someone has read it to her several times a day for the past few days, and I've taken a turn as well!

 

A Small Miracle is made like, and employs the painted art style of, other children's picture books, but Collington also put several frames on each page to tell a sequential story - so secretly, it's also a comic. This is a wordless book, so the entire story is told through the art.

 

On a cold winter morning, an old woman wakes up in her small wooden house. There's frost on the windows and holes in the floor. She checks her stove, but she's out of fuel. There's no food either, and no money to buy more. She wraps up in a coat and shawl, and takes her accordion, and goes outside. We see that her house is a wagon at the edge of a field by the woods. Based on the visual cues, I think the old woman is Roma.

 

She walks across several snow-covered fields and passes a church before she gets to town. It looks like she's somewhere in Europe, or maybe Britain, in something like the present day. She sees someone unloading a nativity display from the back of their car. Despite the snow, the town is bustling with people out shopping. She sets up between two shops and plays her accordion, but everyone passes her by. She falls asleep, and when she wakes up, it's nearing the end of the day. She has no money from playing, so she sells her accordion at the pawn shop.

 

As she leaves the shop, a thief on a motorbike drives by and snatches her purse. She follows the trail of his bike through the snow, and sees that he's gone into the church. He bursts out the front door on his bike holding a donation bucket, but the old woman grabs it and wrestles it from him, then rushes into the church and locks the door. She sees that he's knocked over the nativity display. She puts the bucket back and sets the nativity scene back up. She checks outside and the thief has left, so she starts her long walk home.

 

Along the way, she collapses in a field. The colors go from afternoon, to evening, to night. The woman's body is progressively covered by a blanket of snow. It's at this point that the titular small miracle occurs. (I think? You could also read this as the moment of the old woman's death, and what happens next as her symbolic welcome into the afterlife. But for the purposes of reading aloud to kid, it's definitely a miracle!)

 

The figures from the nativity scene - Mary and Joseph, baby Jesus, and the three Wise Men - come to life and rush from the church to the field. They lift the old woman and carry her to her wagon. They put her to bed. Mary and the baby Jesus sit by her bedside to comfort her. Joseph sets to work chopping wood for her stove. 

 

The three Wise Men take their gifts to the pawn shop, where the shopkeeper is thrilled by the gold and gives them a big handful of money. They buy back the accordion and then head to the grocery store. The other shoppers are like, very lightly surprised, but like the pawn shop owner, accept the little walking statues with remarkable aplomb.

 

Back at the wagon, there's fire in the stove, and Joseph is busy repairing the hole in the floor and any other flaws in the woodwork. The Wise Men cook the woman some dinner, and set out the accordion and remaining cash where she can find them. All the nativity figures leave to return to the church. The old woman wakes up, and is hugely surprised to see that she has warmth, and food, and money, and even her accordion back!

 

Contained in this story, I think, is a message from Collington about the worth and dignity of ethnic minorities, and about the proper use of the church's resources.

A is for Bee

 
A is for Bee

An Alphabet Book in Translation
by Ellen Heck

Levine Querido

2022

 

 

A is for Bee is a children's picture book where each page shows a single animal associated with a letter of the English alphabet, and a list of names for that animal in other languages where its name starts with that letter.

So 'A is for bee' because it is 'anu in Igbo, ari in Turkish, aamoo in Ojibwe, abelha in Portuguese.'

Each animal is depicted as a print from a woodcut or linocut. Heck also provides an author's note explaining how she ensured that her translations and transliterations were correct, and an index that lists all the languages included in the book, and which letters each is paired with.

Because I know you're wondering, Q is for frog, X is for bear, and Z is for elephant. Our old friend the zebra still makes it in, appearing at letter V.