books together

From Los Gatos Black on Halloween by Marisa Montes; illustrated by Yuyi Morales (Henry Holt, 2006):

Los gatos black with eyes of green,
Cats slink and creep on Halloween.
With ojos keen that squint and gleam--
They yowl, they hiss...they sometimes scream.

This book won the 2008 Pura Belpre Medal for Yuyi Morales's richly atmospheric paintings, which reflect the traditions of both Halloween and the Mexican Day of the Dead.  It also won a Pura Belpre Honor for Marisa Montes's rhyming text about a monster's ball on Halloween night that is interrupted by the arrival of [spoiler alert!] trick-or-treaters.

Montes incorporates some spooky Spanish words: see above as well as, for example,
la bruja (witch), el esqueleto (skeleton), la calabaza (pumpkin), and medianoche (midnight).  I like that the Spanish words are specific to the Halloween context; this helps integrate them into the text.  The text itself is sometimes redundant (I don't think the English word is always required, especially when there are context clues, illustrations, and a glossary), but that doesn't seem to bother the kids.

What does bother them are those gorgeous, glowing paintings.  Too scary!  Maybe next year.

[The Poetry Friday Round-up is at Becky's Books Reviews today.]

I suppose I should be pleased that the cat in Caroline Lazo's charming picture book Someday When My Cat Can Talk (illustrated by Kyrsten Brooker; Schwartz and Wade, 2008) made it to Spain on his European adventure at all.  But here's what he has to say about it:

He'll talk about events in Spain--
like bullfights every spring.
And he'll praise himself for stopping one
by jumping in the ring.

At the back of the book, Lazo notes that "[b]ullfighting is Spain's best known and most-unusual spectacle, but today many people think it is cruel to kill bulls--or any animals--for sport, and hope it will end soon."  While I'm not accusing Lazo of perpetuating the leyenda negra in picture book form, I'm disappointed that she chose bullfighting to represent Spain.  No other country is represented negatively.  Next time, may I suggest that the cat make a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, read Don Quijote, dance flamenco or visit the Alhambra instead?

[Disclaimer:  No bulls were harmed in the writing of this post.  And the Poetry Friday roundup is at author amok.  Thanks!]

We've been enjoying the latest in the series of "I Spy" art books by Lucy Mickelthwait, I Spy Colors in Art (Greenwillow, 2007).  The concept is simple and elegant:  pair an "I Spy" statement ("I spy with my little eye an orange orange") with a painting (John Frederick Peto, The Poor Man's Store) on the facing page.  You can extend it all sorts of ways, too:  after she finds what I'm spying, Milly asks me to look for something else in each painting; or we'll make up a story about what might happen next.  All the while, the kids (Leo likes to play, too) are familiarizing themselves with fine art and figuring out how to join the conversation about it.

Milly had a lot to say on Saturday at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.  We were just trying to escape from the heat at the Arts on Foot festival, but her interest in looking at and talking about particular paintings reminded me that we haven't visited the National Gallery with her, either.  At least not since she could talk.  We're already planning to visit later this month.

Of course, a visit to the art museum should always end at the museum gift shop, where you can purchase for small change a postcard of the painting (or whatever) you liked best.  I have a small collection of museum postcards that tends toward paintings of mothers and daughters; women reading, writing, or doing needlework; 15th c. portraits and Dutch interiors.  As Milly starts her own collection of art cards, I'm considering mounting them in a series of simple staple-bound books so we can play "I spy" with paintings that mean something special to her.

[I spy the Nonfiction Monday roundup at Picture Book of the Day!]

My favorite picture book edition of Edward Lear's The Owl and the Pussycat is, not suprisingly, James Marshall's.  I love that the "beautiful pea-green boat" is a cruise ship, the S.S. Dorabella.  The watercolor sketches for this book were Marshall's last work.

Lear himself did not finish "The Children of the Owl and the Pussycat," portions of which were published posthumously.  Here are the opening lines:

Our mother was the Pussycat,
our father was the Owl,
And so we're partly little beasts
and partly little fowl.

The brothers of our family
have feathers and they hoot,
While all the sisters dress in fur
and have long tails to boot.

We all believe that little mice,
For food are singularly nice.

[Poetry Friday roundup at Biblio File.]

The most endearing detail of Axel Scheffler's art for The Gruffalo's Child by Julia Donaldson (Dial Books for Young Readers, 2005) is the stick doll that she carries thoughout the book.  You can see her clutching it on the cover.  The year The Gruffalo's Child came out, I made Leo a small stuffed gruffalo, complete with stick doll, and gave it to him together with the book for Christmas (believe me, it was much easier to make than the gruffalo costume he wanted for Halloween that year would have been).  The stick doll has since been lost, but I suspect we will be making more once we read Donaldson and Scheffler's latest book:  Stick Man.  It's available now in the UK (Leo, as a member of The Gruffalo Gang, heard about it first).

I wonder whether Donaldson and Scheffler collaborated at all on this new book?  The text of The Gruffalo's Child doesn't say anything about the stick doll (there are some stick animals, too), so I assume that was originally Scheffler's idea, and Donaldson ran with it.  At any rate, the kids and I love Donaldson and Scheffler's work, and it seems that kids and parents in Great Britain do, too:  two of their books (The Gruffalo and Room on the Broom) made this top ten list of Britain's favorite bedtime stories (scroll down; from The Scotsman, 9/4/2008).  Check out The Snail and the Whale, too:  highly recommended.

[N.b., at our house we pronounce it GROO-ffa-lo.  Don't you?]

Today is Wilma Rudolph's birthday; she was born on June 23, 1940 near Clarksville, Tennesee, the twentieth of twenty-two children (I love this detail).  Wilma was the first American woman to win three gold medals in an Olympic Games (Rome, 1960); she defeated polio and prejudice to get there.  We re-read Wilma Unlimited: How Wilma Rudolph Became the World's Fastest Woman by Kathleen Krull; illustrated by David Diaz (Harcourt, 1996) today in her honor; she became one of Leo's heroes (and mine, too) when we first read this book before the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens.  It's an amazing story; well worth reading before this summer's Olympic Games in Beijing, too.

[See more Nonfiction Monday posts at Picture Book of the Day.]

The winners of the 2008 Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards were announced today (see the list of past winners and honor books here).  The judges awarded a special citation, only the fifth in the BGHB's 40-year history, to The Arrival by Shaun Tan (Arthur A. Levine, 2007).  On his website, Tan describes the book as "a migrant story told as a series of wordless images that might seem to come from a forgotten time."  The more I read about the ideas behind the book and the process of creating it (also on Tan's website), the more interested I am in reading it and the rest of Tan's work, none of which is available at my library.  I hope that will change now.

Another book about the immigrant experience won the BGHB Award for a Picture Book in 1994.  Grandfather's Journey by Allen Say (Houghton Mifflin, 1993) is a beautiful book, quiet and powerful; one of my favorites.  It won the Caldecott earlier that year, too.  Highly recommended.

We read everything Emily Jenkins writes (for kids; she also writes for adults, but I haven't read all of that. Yet).  What Happens on Wednesdays (illustrated by Lauren Castillo; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007) was of particular interest to Milly, who is starting to pay more careful attention to the days of the week and the routines that correspond to each one.  WHoH is as much about the preschool-aged narrator's (urban) neighborhood as it is about what she does there, and Lauren Castillo's mixed-media illustrations of Brooklyn in winter are warm with just the right amount of detail.

Jenkins writes (on her amazon.com blog) that "[her] hope is that readers and families will map their neighborhoods and write down their schedules, focusing not only on the events and locations that are important to the adults for navigation and structure, but on the things that matter to the children as individuals."  And that's exactly what the kids started working on, without any prompting from me, as soon as we finished this book.

[Two new Jenkins books not to be missed: Skunkdog (pictures by Pierre Pratt; FSG, April 2008); and Toy Dance Party (pictures by Paul O. Zelinsky; Schwartz and Wade, forthcoming in September 2008).]

These are the opening lines of The Secret World of Hildegard, a picture book biography of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) written by Jonah Winter and illustrated by Jeannette Winter (Arthur A. Levine Books, 2007):

Hundreds and hundreds of years ago in a time known as the Middle Ages, men ruled over the earth.  And these men were very gray.  And the buildings they built were very gray.  And all the towns were very gray.  And all the gray towns were run by mayors who were men.  Girls were not allowed to go to school, and most girls could not read.  They were taught to serve and obey all the boys around them.  They were taught to keep quiet and to be very gray.

Is this an accurate description of the Middle Ages?  Is it how most people imagine them (not my former students, I hope)?  Or does it function as a dramatic device, as the Horn Book's review (available here) suggests; one that allows the Winters to "set the scene perfectly: out of the dark, gray world of the Middle Ages shines the radiant light of visionary Hildegard."  Is it acceptable (if also, I would argue, overly generalizing and negative in the extreme) for a nonfiction picture book?

I'm a medievalist. I would have loved this small square volume (I, or rather my kids, are probably its intended audience):  Jonah Winter's writing is simple and elegant; Jeannette Winter's illuminations, done in acrylic and pen on watercolor paper, manage to be both medieval and modern (and gorgeous).  There is a good author's note expanding on Hildegard's fame as a scientist and composer as well as a mystic visionary; and a bibliography.  If I could only get past the first page.

The poem in my pocket yesterday was a childhood favorite: "Los zapaticos de rosa" by Cuban poet Jose Martí (picture book edition illustrated by Lulu Delacre; Lectorum, 1997). I chose it in honor of my mother, whose birthday was yesterday, too. When I was little I used to make her recite it to me every night before bed. She knows it by heart; the way, I suspect, many Cubans (and Cuban-Americans) do. These are the opening lines:

Hay sol bueno y mar de espuma
Y arena fina, y Pilar
Quiere salir a estrenar
Su sombrerito de pluma.

¡Feliz cumpleaños, Mami!

[This week's Poetry Friday roundup is at The Well-Read Child (which also happens to be one of my favorite kidlit blogs).]