Humphrey's Bedtime
Written and illustrated by Sally Hunter. Henry Holt. Humphrey
and his older sister Lottie are two little elephants whose before-bedtime
activities are narrated by British author/illustrator Sally Hunter
in the second volume of a series for very young readers. Humphrey
eats his dinner, has a bath, and gets ready for bed while Lottie
is performing the same tasks with her many stuffed animals, in
Ms. Hunter's gentle, soft-focused sketches in pink, peach, and
lavender pastels. (Ages 2-4)
Hello School! A Classroom Full of Poems
By Dee Lillegard. Illustrated by Don Carter. Alfred A. Knopf.
The duo responsible for Wake
up, House! is back with a similar book, this time featuring
short rhymes about school for younger readers. Advertising art
director Don Carter again provides his highly distinctive, three-dimensional
cutout art of alphabet letters, flowerpots on windowsills, scissors,
and glue in bright colors, complementing the cheerful, forthright
text. If only all school experiences were as much fun as those
depicted in Hello School! (Ages 3-6)
The Three Little Kittens
Written and illustrated by Anna Alter. Henry Holt. Anna Alter's
idiosyncratic style is immediately recognizable in her retelling
of a familiar nursery rhyme illustrated with pencil and watercolor
in a manner somewhat reminiscent of folk art. The tale of the
three kittens' plight is interspersed with lively scenes of a
mouse family that shares the kittens' living space, which I actually
preferred to the pictures of the cats. Yet another example of
this publisher's excellent quality of print production and design.
(Both this book and Little Dinosaur, reviewed below, would
make fine gifts.) (Ages 3-6)
It's My City! A Singing Map
By April Pulley Sayre. Illustrated by Denis Roche. Greenwillow
Books. A little girl and her brother take a long walk to a corner
market and back in a story told in simple rhymes and flat, two-dimensional
gouaches for younger readers. The low-density city they walk
through looks more like a bland, generic, semi-suburban landscape,
cluttered with a hodgepodge of more structures--a bridge, elevated
train, riverside playground, skyscraper--than two children would
encounter on any urban walk I know. (Ages 4-7)
Little Dinosaur
By Mike Thaler. Illustrated by Paige Miglio. Henry Holt. A gentle,
imaginative little dinosaur goes through a very busy day of at-home
activities--painting at his easel, playing with blocks, riding
a make-believe train and rocket ship, learning to print the alphabet,
flying a kite, spotting a rainbow--in a high-quality volume produced
with Henry Holt's usual careful attention to details. (Ages 4-7)
Little Whistle's Dinner Party
By Cynthia Rylant. Illustrated by Tim Bowers. Harcourt. Little
Whistle, the brown guinea pig who lives in the Toytown toy store,
returns in the second volume of a series by prolific veteran
children's writer Cynthia Rylant. This time, the nocturnal Little
Whistle decides to give a midnight dinner party for his friends
in Toytown. After the store's lights are turned off for the day
and its door locked, Little Whistle takes the Toytown train around
the store to pick out a tea set, teakettle, and kitchen appliances
for preparing his carefully saved guinea pig treats. After the
guests are assembled, Little Whistle makes a slightly delayed
arrival by helicopter with dessert in hand for all his guests.
This pleasant story avoids the problem of the first Little Whistle
book--that too many of the toys were transient, on their way
to being sold. The reader hopes that future volumes will continue
to feature a permanent group of characters. (Ages 4-7)
One Monday
Written and illustrated by Amy Huntington. Orchard Books. One
Monday morning a strong wind thunders into the farm where Annabelle
lives with a menagerie of animals. This uninvited visitor stays
for almost a week, wreaking near-havoc in its path: it was so
windy that "the pigs' curly tails were straightened out
like rulers," "sunflower heads spun off like flying
saucers," and "the cow had lost most of her spots."
Newcomer Amy Huntington has skillfully illustrated her breezy
tale (with excellent overall design by Orchard Books) with humorous
watercolors that recall the action-packed style of the late author/artist
Bill Peet; I especially enjoyed the little mouse riding from
page to page on his yellow-legal-paper airplane. On Sunday this
pandemonium finally subsides, and everyone on the farm is able
to start picking up after themselves, but on Monday it starts
to rain...(the mouse's paper airplane has now become a sailboat).
(Ages 4-7)
Sun Bread
Written and illustrated by Elisa Kleven. Dutton. Relentless wind,
snow, and rain are the spoilsports in inventive author/illustrator
Elisa Kleven's latest effort. Sun Bread showcases Ms.
Kleven's idiosyncratic watercolor collages, swirling with the
activities of her usual menagerie of animals, who are all out
of sorts and stricken with cabin fever due to the prolonged bad
weather. Then a baker decides to bake a sun bread of her own,
and the yeasty golden round of dough makes the animals celebrate
so joyously, the real sun finally emerges from the clouds and
eats some of the sun bread himself. Although this is a simple
story, adults as well as young children will appreciate Elisa
Kleven's world-of-her-own artwork, filled with rainbows, clouds,
streaming water, and circling birds. (Ages 4-adult)
A Castle on Viola Street
Written and illustrated by DyAnne DiSalvo. HarperCollins. Andy,
his mother and father, and two younger sisters live in an old
apartment building on Emerald Street, in an unnamed city neighborhood
that echoes the bay-windowed porchfronts of Baltimore and Philadelphia
and the close-knit family ties of some areas of Brooklyn, New
York ("Bocce tournament at Spaghetti Park," a public
notice reads). One Saturday morning while Andy and his sisters
are pulling their cartload of laundry to a local laundromat,
they see workers unloading equipment in front of three boarded-up
houses. It turns out that a Habitat for Humanity-type, "sweat
equity" organization is renovating these houses; although
Andy's family is not selected to receive the first house, all
five of them pitch in to help at the project's start. At the
book's conclusion, Andy's family receives word that a future
house that they are to work on will be their own.
DyAnne DiSalvo is a sincere, conscientious writer whose interest
in the renaissance of old-fashioned urban neighborhoods and a
way of life (similar to my own childhood) that might be considered
obscure or archaic to some, is evident in all her work. Her earlier
volume, Grandpa's Corner
Store (previously reviewed in these pages), expressed
these values particularly well (indeed, Grandpa has a nonspeaking
cameo role in A Castle on Viola Street). Her characters'
warmth, generosity, and resourcefulness are always welcome. (Ages
5-9)
The Class Artist
Written and illustrated by G. Brian Karas. Greenwillow Books.
Fred would like to be able to draw, but when his teacher assigns
his class a week-long art project, Fred has a lot of trouble
completing his paper tipi and doesn't want to ask anyone else
for help. Instead, though, he draws a multi-panel mural that
the entire class ends up admiring, in this casually sketched
story. (Ages 5-7)
Goin' Someplace Special
By Patricia C. McKissack. Illustrated by Jerry Pinckney. Atheneum.
'Tricia Ann receives permission from her grandmother to visit
her favorite place, "Someplace Special," in this story
based on late-1950s segregated Nashville. Patricia McKissack
details the nuances of 'Tricia Ann's bus trip downtown; her stop
at Peace Garden, a public park that her grandfather helped build
but on whose benches she cannot sit; her detour into a fancy
hotel with an unwelcoming manager; her conversation with a street
pretzel vendor who advises her not to let "those signs"
steal her happiness. Ultimately 'Tricia Ann does arrive at Someplace
Special--the main public library, a monumental limestone building
upon whose facade is chiseled the inscription "all are welcome."
Goin' Someplace Special is the most upbeat and absorbing
story and the most beautifully illustrated book in a crowded
field of similar titles released during the past year or so.
Veteran illustrator Jerry Pinckney's light-suffused pencil-and-watercolor
drawings are, as usual, sumptuous in this large-format picture
book, and anyone who loves flowers and gardens should read Goin'
Someplace Special for the sheer pleasure of the artwork:
Mama Frances' cozy front yard, the lush double-page spread of
the Peace Fountain with sprays of water bubbling and birds circling
about, the gardens on the site of a ruined church tended by an
eccentric older lady. An autobiographical author's note at the
book's conclusion contains the reminder that "reading is
the doorway to freedom." (Ages 5-8)
The Little Skyscraper
Written and illustrated by Scott Santoro. Price Stern Sloan.
A respectable debut by film animator Scott Santoro, from a Simon
and Schuster division known more for joke books and novelties
than for children's fiction. The little skyscraper, a small limestone
building with a park at his base, seems to have been built in
the 1930s, judging from the details of nearby movie houses, passing
cars below, and a floating dirigible overhead. As the nameless
city around him progresses to the 1950s, a little boy named Jack
takes a liking to the building, always asking his parents to
stop and visit the observation deck. More years pass, and many
of the skyscraper's neighboring smaller buildings are torn down
to be replaced by modern office towers. The park at his base
is even paved over for a parking lot. Eventually the stained,
shabby skyscraper is scheduled to be demolished, when a passerby--Jack,
now an adult and an architect--gets involved in the case, organizes
rallies, and convinces the mayor to designate the skyscraper
a landmark, and deserving of a full restoration. Thanks to Jack's
hard work, "even the tallest, most modern buildings looked
up to the little skyscraper."
The Little Skyscraper is somewhat reminiscent in tone
of the venerable The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray
Bridge, whose minimalist, 1940s-style, four-color process
illustrations it echoes; and Virginia Lee Burton's wonderful
classic about urban activism and community involvement, Maybelle the Cable Car (see
Bradley Beach Books' Classic Backlist section). Scott Santoro
obviously cares about both historic preservation and the urban
environment, and the inclusion of a little more specific period
detail in his drawings would have been a welcome touch. Perhaps
Mr. Santoro will do so in his next children's book; perhaps,
too, Price Stern Sloan will assume a greater role in publishing
children's fiction in the future. (Ages 5-7)
Light-Gathering Poems
Edited by Liz Rosenberg. Henry Holt. Editor and SUNY professor
Liz Rosenberg has gathered both familiar and lesser-known poems
in an excellent anthology that will appeal to both older teenagers
and adults. In her introduction, Ms. Rosenberg notes that she
views each individual as a shard of light, in the tradition of
ancient Hebrew scriptures, and offers her anthology in the hope
of creating tikkun olam, repairing the world, as the shards
of light join together.
Light-Gathering Poems includes a genuinely multicultural
variety of poets, both contemporary and classic, and features
not only the more predictable choices such as Robert Frost, Emily
Dickinson, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, but also the lesser-known
Arakida Moritake, Das Lanzillotti, Charles Reznikoff, and Henry
M. Seiden. The notes on contributors at the back of the anthology
make marvelous reading on their own--Ms. Rosenberg has a knack
for condensed biography; the book-jacket design by Debbie Glasserman
is invigorating. Light-Gathering Poems would make a superb
gift not only for high school or college graduates but for any
venturesome reader. Recommended. (Ages 14-adult)
CHILDREN'S FALL 2000/WINTER 2001
CHILDREN'S SPRING/SUMMER 2000
CHILDREN'S BACKLIST
ABOUT NEW YORK--PERMANENT COLLECTION
ABOUT NEW YORK--CLASSIC BACKLIST
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