The Horn Book » HBMNov12

Review of The Man from the Land of Fandango

Kathleen T. Horning — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 15:30:15 +0000

The Man from the  Land of Fandango
by Margaret Mahy;  illus. by Polly Dunbar
Preschool, Primary Clarion 32 pp.
10/12 978-0-547-81988-4 $16.99 g
When it comes to contemporary nonsense verse, no one wrote it better than the late Margaret Mahy (see Susan Cooper’s reminiscence of her friend). With this latest offering, Mahy places herself right up there with the nineteenth-century masters of the form, Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Here she uses an enclosed rhyme scheme, alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme with such precision that it feels as though there is not a word out of place — even though they are completely nonsensical. Most like her famous Bubble Trouble (rev. 5/09) in spirit, The Man from the Land of Fandango is less complicated in both its twists of tongue and story. After describing the main character, Mahy tells us what will happen when he pays a call: “Oh, wherever they dance in Fandango, / The bears and the bison join in, / And baboons on bassoons make a musical sound, / And the kangaroos come with a hop and a bound, / And the dinosaurs join in the din.” Next comes juggling with jelly and jam, dancing on ceilings and walls, jingling and jangling, tingling and tangling — all activities that would make the Cat in the Hat seem fairly tame. The quirky exuberance of Dunbar’s playful watercolor illustrations is a perfect match for Mahy’s verse; they show two young children reveling in a zany visit from a man they themselves created as a larger-than-life painting that flew off the page.

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Review of One Times Square

Barbara Bader — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 15:30:13 +0000

One Times Square:
A Century of Change at the  Crossroads of the World
by Joe McKendry; illus. by the author
Intermediate Godine 64 pp.
9/12 978-1-56792-364-3 $19.95
You are there at the birth, the decay, and the revival of Times Square, the “crossroads of the world” for a century. McKendry (Beneath the Streets of Boston, rev. 9/05) is an illustrator and a documentarian, with the know-how to supply technical construction drawings, to paint stirring double-page bleeds of the neon-lighted nightlife, and to draw street scenes as they might have been drawn in times past. His focal point is the Times Tower, at One Times Square—built in 1904 as the home of The New York Times, soon the site of the celebrated New Year’s Eve ball-drop and the wraparound “Zipper” news bulletins, today largely an empty shell covered with more than twenty electronic and vinyl billboards, making it “the most valuable signpost in the world.” McKendry doesn’t inflect his text; there’s no drama to his account of Times Square’s ups and downs. (The porn, prostitution, and street-crime decades are treated matter-of-factly.) But visually the book is a spectacle worthy of its subject. A brief list of sources is appended.

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David Levithan on Every Day

Christine M. Heppermann — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 17:45:12 +0000

From the November/December 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine:

Reviewer Christine Hepperman asks author and editor David Levithan about writing gender (and the lack thereof) in his YA novel Every Day. Read the full review of Every Day here.

Christine Hepperman: Were there specific challenges in writing a character who is both genders and neither?

David Levithan: When you think of a character as purely a voice, purely a self, purely as words, it’s easy to defy gender. I had never noticed before how largely genderless English is, lending itself well to this neutrality. The foreign translations, I imagine, are going to be more of a challenge, since other languages unfortunately gender language much more.

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Review of Every Day

Christine M. Heppermann — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 17:15:06 +0000

Every Day
by David Levithan
Middle School, High School    Knopf    325 pp.
8/12    978-0-307-93188-7    $16.99
Library ed. 978-0-375-97111-2    $19.99
e-book ed. 978-0-307-97563-8    $10.99
“A,” the narrator of Levithan’s brilliantly conceived novel, wakes up in a different sixteen-year-old’s body every morning and has to adjust to different physical characteristics, a different family, a different school, different friends. The process does have certain parameters. For instance, A always wakes up in bodies that match his/her (the protagonist is, in essence, gender neutral) age and never travels far geographically unless the host body does. A realizes that this way of life is unique, but over the years s/he has come to terms with it. “I’m never going to figure it out, any more than a normal person will figure out his or her own existence. After a while, you have to be at peace with the fact that you simply are.” But what happens when A falls in love? Levithan poses this question early in the novel and then shapes the narrative into a profound exploration of what it means to love someone. Before meeting Rhiannon, A responsibly tried not to make waves in his/her hosts’ lives, like a camper who leaves a campsite as clean as it was found. But now s/he “hijacks” bodies, making them drive to meet Rhiannon at parties and coffee shops. In one instance A strands a host, Cinderella-like, by the side of the road at midnight so that the boy awakens in his car, ranting that he was the victim of demonic possession. “I am not the devil,” A thinks. So who is s/he? What is his/her place in the world? Readers will savor every word of A’s attempt to figure that out.

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Book Request Haiku

Rebecca Donnelly — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 21:01:31 +0000

All I know is that
The toad takes some kind of bath
And lives forever.
(Tuck Everlasting)

My teacher read it
To show why we should always
Listen to spiders.
(Charlotte’s Web)

The illustrations
Showed corks growing in bunches
Like fruit on the trees.
(The Story of Ferdinand)

A single gold tooth,
One of them had, but neither
Of them wore a shirt.
(George and Martha)

You know the one where
The police officers
Look like (ahem) pigs?
(Sylvester and the Magic Pebble)

Mother and father
Left him all alone and then
A lion ate him.
(Pierre)

There’s a bird in it
And you’re not supposed to let
Him do anything.
(Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus)

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Review of Bailey at the Museum

Robin Smith — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 15:40:52 +0000

Bailey at the Museum
by Harry Bliss; illus. by the author
Primary Scholastic 32 pp.
9/12 978-0-545-23345-3 $16.99
In his second adventure, the irrepressible titular hound from Bailey (rev. 11/11) — the only dog in Mrs. Smith’s class — is excited about the field trip to the Museum of Natural History. Though his classmates are well behaved, Bailey can’t contain his enthusiasm: he crawls up (and gnaws on) the T. rex skeleton’s spine, sneaks into a teepee for a quick snooze, and wanders away from the group. Even though his actions repeatedly land him in the doghouse, his confidence and charm (along with his keen sense of smell) win the day. He also makes a lifelong friend of the patient security guard tasked to corral the rambunctious pup. Told in straight narrative and with speech balloons, the text provides readers with a clear view into childlike Bailey’s active mind, along with his classmates’ (and bystanders’) pithy observations. Bliss’s varied illustrations, switching from close-ups to pigeon-eye-views, keep the tone light and the action moving; Bailey’s tail is moving, too — all the time. Enthusiastic fans will beg to see Bailey in other familiar school situations. Good dog, Bailey…and great book, Bliss.

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Review of Pinned

Susan Dove Lempke — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 15:30:08 +0000

Pinned
by Sharon G. Flake
Middle School, High School    Scholastic    231 pp.
10/12    978-0-545-05718-9    $17.99
e-book ed. 978-0-545-46984-5    $17.99
Ninth-grader Autumn is great at some things — wrestling, for one; cooking, for another. Reading is not one of her skills, due in part to multiple moves during her early childhood and parents who also don’t read well. She tells her story in a forthright, colloquial way: “I don’t wanna go to college. I wanna be a chef.” Her chapters alternate with those narrated by Adonis, whose speech is formal and whose opinion of himself is lofty: “I do not dull my light so other people will feel better about themselves.” Born without legs, Adonis manages the school wrestling team on which Autumn is the star (and the only girl). She unabashedly loves Adonis, despite his prickly superiority and oft-avowed rejection, but she doesn’t know the secret that he and her best friend, Peaches, share. Autumn and Adonis, in addition to the supporting characters — parents, teachers, and friends alike — have distinctive personalities and voices, enhancing the story’s depth and complexity. Additionally, Autumn’s viewpoint on reading (that it’s more trouble than it’s worth), along with the respect given to the sport of wrestling and the book’s touching, tentative romance, may appeal to reluctant readers.

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Holiday High Notes 2012

Horn Book — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 17:15:53 +0000

Deck the halls, spin the dreidels… and enjoy our annual selection of new holiday books,  with reviews written by the Horn Book staff.

Daddy Christmas &  Hanukkah Mama
by Selina Alko; illus. by the author
Preschool, Primary    Knopf   32 pp.
9/12    978-0-375-86093-5    $16.99
Library ed. 978-0-375-96093-2    $19.99
Sadie, happily ensconced in two cultures, describes her family’s December holiday traditions. Daddy Christmas makes latkes for Santa while Hanukkah Mama hangs stockings by the fireplace, and neighborhood caroling involves both Christmas and Hanukkah songs. Upbeat gouache, colored-pencil, and collage illustrations give the illusion of texture and fabric, adding a handmade quality reminiscent of a scrapbook—appropriate for a story about the stitching together of cultural influences and traditions. DEVON JOHNSON

The Count’s Hanukkah  Countdown
by Tilda Balsley and Ellen Fischer; illus. by Tom Leigh
Preschool, Primary    Kar-Ben    24 pp.
8/12    978-0-7613-7556-2    $16.95
Paper ed. 978-0-7613-7557-9    $6.95    g
e-book ed. 978-1-4677-0694-0    $13.95
Sesame Street mainstays Grover and the Count star, with new Israeli friends Avigail and Brosh, in this Shalom Sesame celebration of Hanukkah. Eight friends and family members—“the perfect Hanukkah number,” by the Count’s refrain—come together to light the menorah, feast on latkes and sufganiyot (jelly donuts), and listen to Uncle Joe’s retelling of the Hanukkah story. Bright, familiar-from-Sesame Street illustrations complement the text, which features a successful imitation of Grover’s signature singsong cadence, while bold-face numbers emphasize the Count’s favorite pastime. ALLISON E. COLE

Santa from Cincinnati
by Judi Barrett; illus. by Kevin Hawkes
Primary Atheneum 48 pp.
10/12 978-1-4424-2993-2 $16.99
Who says Santa is supernatural? According to Barrett and Hawkes, he’s just an ordinary guy from Cincinnati blessed with a “jovial disposition,” an “obsession with toys,” a mind for invention, and a generous nature. The story follows the lad from babyhood through his early schooling and then to college (“where they let me major in toys and minor in business”), married life, and beyond. Santa’s first-person narration is plainspoken with an occasional, apt touch of folksiness. Hawkes’s vibrant acrylic and colored-pencil illustrations capture both the simpler-times Midwestern family sensibility and the winking, tall-tale elements of this satisfying origin story. ELISSA GERSHOWITZ

Just Right for Christmas
by Birdie Black;  illus. by Rosalind Beardshaw
Primary Nosy Crow/Candlewick 32 pp.
9/12 978-0-7636-6174-8 $15.99
On Christmas Eve, a king asks his sewing maids to make a cloak for the princess from a beautiful cloth, “so red and soft and Christmassy.” Scraps from the cloth are left at the back door, where the castle’s kitchen maid finds them and makes a jacket for her mother. A badger named Bertie then uses the maid’s leftover scraps to make a hat for his pa, and the cycle continues as the fabric is put to use by tinier and tinier kingdom inhabitants. On Christmas morning, each gift “felt just right… / just how Christmas should feel.” Well-paired with Beardshaw’s jovial, wintry mixed-media art, Black’s story of thoughtful gift-giving—part Mr. Willowby’s Christmas Tree, part Joseph Had a Little Overcoat—embodies the selflessness of true holiday spirit. KATRINA HEDEEN

Christmas Parade
by Sandra Boynton;  illus. by the author
Preschool Little Simon 32 pp.
10/12 978-1-4424-6813-9 $14.99
“Run to the window! / Pull up the shade!” A little pig in bunny slippers watches a Christmas parade pass by. An elephant keeps the beat with a bass drum (“BOOM-biddy / BOOM-biddy”); he’s followed by bassoon-playing chickens, pigs with balloons and a glockenspiel, hippo drummers (“and one drummer cat”), confetti-tossing reindeer, and a rhino dressed as Santa. Two cows, three mice, four ducks, and “the tiniest bird” add even more music and merriment. The band struts across richly colored monochromatic backgrounds that seem to make the wide-eyed animals march right off the pages. Boynton’s recognizable menagerie and up-tempo rhyming text brim with holiday cheer. KITTY FLYNN

Who Built the Stable?: A Nativity Poem
by Ashley Bryan; illus. by the author
Preschool, Primary Atheneum 40 pp.
10/12 978-1-4424-0934-7 $16.99
“Who built the stable / Where the Baby Jesus lay? / Was it built of bricks, / Was it built of clay?” Bryan’s child-centered verse involves readers from the very start as it tells the Nativity story from the point of view of the young shepherd/carpenter’s apprentice who built that iconic stable. Lush illustrations offer a controlled tumult of verdant flora and fauna (on one spread multicolored elephants, lions, monkeys, and giraffes coexist with the more typical lambs and oxen). The book ends with the boy welcoming Mary and Joseph to his stable and then communing with Baby Jesus: “The boy looked in / The infant’s eyes and in his heart he knew: / The babe would be a carpenter. / He’d be a shepherd too.” MARTHA V. PARRAVANO

The Birds of Bethlehem
by Tomie dePaola; illus. by the author
Primary Paulsen/Penguin 40 pp.
10/12 978-0-399-25780-3 $16.99
Peaceably sharing the gleanings of the autumn harvest, a dozen birds are also discussing the news. The blue pair has seen a couple being led to the stables; the red birds have seen an angel in the sky; the brown ones have heard the heavenly host; etc. There isn’t any surprise or tension here, but the acrylic paintings of the birds and Holy Family (its members left unidentified) are theatrically composed on spacious spreads. The colors of the birds (each, as they are in nature, a different shade from its mate) are a refreshing contrast to the holiday’s usual hues. ROGER SUTTON

The Santa Trap
by Jonathan Emmett;  illus. by Poly Bernatene
Primary Peachtree 32 pp.
10/12 978-1-56145-670-3 $15.95
Bradley Bartleby is a menace—“he’d been born bad.” As his antics grow worse throughout the years, his parents cater to him (“because they were terrified”), but Santa does not: every Christmas Bradley receives only socks from jolly Saint Nick. So Bradley hatches a plan to capture Santa—using an absurdly intricate trap that includes dynamite, vicious tigers, a guillotine, and more—and make sure “the fat fool” gets exactly what he deserves. In a humorous twist ending, it’s Bradley who’s served his comeuppance (and another pair of socks). Bernatene’s digital illustrations bring the troublemaker’s beastliness to life in this cautionary tale disguised as a holiday romp. KATRINA HEDEEN

Christmas Wombat
by Jackie French;  illus. by Bruce Whatley
Preschool, Primary Clarion 32 pp.
10/12 978-0-547-86872-1 $16.99
Wombat, whose sedentary lifestyle mostly revolves around eating carrots, embarks on an eventful Christmas Eve journey that transforms the creature from homebody to world traveler overnight. Wombat repeatedly stumbles across its favorite snack (“my carrots!”), stares down some reindeer, and curls up to catch naps on the back of Santa’s sleigh. As in Diary of a Wombat and Diary of a Baby Wombat (rev. 9/10), succinct sentences and episodic pacing allow Wombat’s adventures to speak for themselves. In the illustrations, spare backgrounds accentuate Wombat’s expressive eyes and rotund body, further playing up the character’s personality and the warmth and humor of this holiday tale. CYNTHIA K. RITTER

Becoming a Ballerina: A Nutcracker Story
by Lise Friedman;  photos by Mary Dowdle
Primary, Intermediate Viking 48 pp.
10/12 978-0-670-01392-0 $18.99
Friedman begins with a tantalizing glimpse backstage on opening night of the Boston Ballet’s annual Nutcracker season. From there, this photo-essay, told in the voice of young Boston Ballet student Fiona, jumps back several months to follow along as she auditions for the coveted role of Clara, wins the part, and prepares for her performance. Dowdle’s crisp color photographs document the ballet company onstage and behind the scenes. Young dancers will be entranced by the fascinating details of rehearsals, costuming, and staging, while Nutcracker fans will treasure this intimate view of a beloved holiday tradition. KATIE BIRCHER

Jeremy’s Dreidel
by Ellie Gellman; illus. by Maria Mola
Primary    Kar-Ben    32 pp.
9/12    978-0-7613-7507-4    $17.95
Paper ed. 978-0-7613-7508-1    $7.95    g
e-book ed. 978-1-4677-0060-3    $13.95
Jeremy and his friends are enjoying the dreidel-making workshop at their local Jewish Community Center, especially since the children are being encouraged to be creative and put their own, er, spins on their designs. Jeremy decides to make a Braille dreidel for his blind father, which occasions the provision of much information about how blind people communicate and get around. But there is much info as well about Hanukkah and its miracles; and directions for making the featured dreidels, rules for playing with them, and the Braille alphabet are all appended. The illustrations are a little washed out but agreeably homey. ROGER SUTTON

Christmastime
by Alison Jay; illus. by the author
Preschool, Primary Dial 32 pp.
11/12 978-0-8037-3804-1 $16.99
At first glance it’s a simple Christmas vocabulary concept book (“candle / holiday card / stocking”), but Jay’s jewel-toned, folk art–like paintings tell a different story (several intertwined ones, in fact) in this visually appealing volume. Incorporating scenes from familiar carols, Bible passages, and secular Santa lore, the pictures show two children traveling to the North Pole, meeting Santa, and returning home, where objects seen on their journey appear as toys under the tree. Sharp-eyed viewers will find much to enjoy throughout. An appended key identifies specific pictorial references to Christmas songs. LOLLY ROBINSON

Our Very Own Christmas
by Annette Langen;  illus. by Marije Tolman
Primary NorthSouth 32 pp.
10/12 978-0-7358-4088-1 $17.95
Young siblings pretend to be Mary and Joseph journeying to Bethlehem. Small, colorful figures in expansive scenes of snow, the two children perform this Nativity play all for themselves, big sister gently reminding little brother of his lines (“Mary whispers to him softly. And little Joseph exclaims with feeling, ‘Oh, woe! Oh, woe!’”). Illustrator Tolman has thoughtfully included a flock of curious sheep and various woodland animals to keep the kids company. After Mary shouts, “Joseph, our baby, baby Christ is here!” they greet the three kings—a smiling mama and, perhaps, grandparents, looking bemused by the children’s gratitude for the “gold, franklin sense, and something else.” Langen’s story is sweet, but never cloying, and ends cozily, with everyone tucked up in a sled, towed behind a snowmobile, and headed toward a brightly lit house and sheep barn. JENNIFER M. BRABANDER

Pete the Cat Saves Christmas
by Eric Litwin; illus. by James Dean
Primary Harper/HarperCollins 40 pp.
10/12 978-0-06-211062-6 $17.99
When Santa comes down with the flu on Christmas Eve, groovy blue cat Pete saves the day in his vintage red minibus pulled by eight reindeer. A rhyming text based on Clement C. Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas” moves the story along at a brisk pace while a refrain about perseverance brings things back down to earth: “Give it your all, give it your all. / At Christmas we give, so give it your all.” Dean’s casual, somewhat naive paintings show a world inhabited by cats (even Santa) except for the reindeer and a yellow bird who is Pete’s sidekick. LOLLY ROBINSON

Christmas at the Toy Museum
by David Lucas; illus. by the author
Primary Candlewick 32 pp.
9/12 978-0-7636-5868-7 $15.99
On Christmas Eve, the inhabitants of the Toy Museum are disappointed to find that there are no gifts waiting for them under the tree. Then wise old cat Bunting shares an epiphany: “Friends! Toys! Puppets!…Why don’t we all give one another ourselves?” They eagerly wrap each other up in boxes and paper (since everyone’s already wrapped, Bunting must tend to himself) and wait until morning. In a somewhat contrived ending, an angel who has been watching over events rewards Bunting for his selflessness with a wish. Lucas’s cozy ink and watercolor illustrations play up both the old-fashioned-looking toys’ well-loved-plaything qualities (e.g., a stuffed bear is missing an eye) and their human ones of kindness, sharing, and community. ELISSA GERSHOWITZ

The Christmas Tugboat: How the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree Came to New York City
by George Matteson and Adele Ursone; illus. by James E. Ransome
Primary Clarion 48 pp.
11/12 978-0-618-99215-7 $17.99
A young girl narrates this absorbing account (based on a true story) of the long-ago year she helped her New York Harbor tugboat captain father deliver the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree to New York City. The tugboat’s journey—up the Hudson River to pick up the barge containing the enormous tree and downriver again—is described in child-friendly detail: what they ate; how loud the engines were; how Dad navigates the river at night; where the family slept. Jewel-toned paintings at times focus on the tugboat’s inhabitants as they work, taking the job very seriously; other spreads capture wider views of the city (including a faint outline of the Twin Towers), the river, and the towed barge’s unusual, festive cargo. MARTHA V. PARRAVANO

Pancho Claus
by José-Luis ;  illus. by Ashley Wolff
Primary Dial 32 pp.
10/12 978-0-8037-3756-3 $16.99 g
On Christmas Eve, Spanish-speaking family members cook a holiday meal, complete with “tamales, nachos y tostadas,” and decorate their tree with “adornos navideños.” The next morning—“Ay, qué sorpresa!”—they discover that Pancho Claus has visited, bringing plenty of joy and “regalitos.” Inspired by Latino Christmas traditions and incorporating lots of Spanish words (glossary appended), Orozco adapts “The Night Before Christmas” in a text that begs to be read aloud. Wolff’s warm gouache and pastel illustrations emphasize family, while small details steadily build anticipation for Christmas Day. SUSAN GRAHAM

Fa La La
by Leslie Patricelli; illus. by the author
Preschool Candlewick 28 pp.
9/12 Board book ed. 978-0-7636-3247-2 $6.99
Patricelli’s baby character of indeterminate gender with the single corkscrew curl returns, here excited that Christmas is on the way: “It’s almost Christmas. I LOVE Christmas!” Among other holiday activities, our narrator describes picking out a tree, hand-crafting some gifts (e.g., a Scotch Tape necklace for Mommy), caroling, and eagerly awaiting Santa’s arrival. As with all of Patricelli’s board books, perfectly pitched to toddlers’ sensibilities, the straightforward text tells only part of the story. The illustrations—acrylics using simple shapes and bold black outlines against vibrant monochromatic backgrounds—fill in the rest by adding lots of personality and humor that can be appreciated both by squirmy kids and holiday-harried parents. ELISSA GERSHOWITZ

Dinosaur vs. Santa
by Bob Shea; illus. by the author
Preschool Disney-Hyperion 40 pp.
9/12 978-1-4231-6806-5 $15.99
The rambunctious little red dino previously tackled bedtime (rev. 9/08), the potty (rev. 1/11), and the library. Now Dinosaur’s getting ready for Christmas—writing Santa a letter (“ROAR! DRAW! SCRIBBLE! ROAR!”), decorating, making presents—and triumphing in each small battle (“Dinosaur wins!”). Temptation (in the form of a gingerbread cookie) almost bests him while he’s “being extra good,” but Dinosaur’s greatest challenge is “falling asleep on Christmas Eve.” The dynamic dino stands out amongst the bold holiday colors, thick lines, expressive type, and minimal mixed-media illustrations. Shea’s lively sense of humor and relatable-to-preschoolers scenarios will make this a holiday read-aloud hit. CYNTHIA K. RITTER

Adventures in Cartooning: Christmas Special
by James Sturm, Andrew Arnold,  and Alexis Frederick-Frost;  illus. by the authors
Primary, Intermediate First Second/Roaring Brook  64 pp. 9/12 Paper ed. 978-1-59643-730-2 $9.99
Dismayed by the “digital age,” Santa decides a comic book is the perfect Christmas present for gadget-addicted kids. He enlists the Magical Cartooning Elf to help write and deliver it, but when the pair runs into trouble, a knight and dragon (two characters from the previous how-to book Adventures in Cartooning) save the day. The comic they create is such a hit that it inspires kids to “turn off their screens” and draw cartoons of their own. The book’s amiable cartoon-panel art and meta elements invite readers to giggle at old-fashioned Santa (with his insistence on a “Night Before Christmas”–style cadence) alongside his tech-savvy elves. KATIE BIRCHER

The Christmas Quiet Book
by Deborah Underwood;  illus. by Renata Liwska
Preschool, Primary Houghton 32 pp.
10/12 978-0-547-55863-9 $12.99
This pleasing companion to The Quiet Book and The Loud Book! explores quiet times of the season, such as “Snow angel quiet.” Liwska’s illustrations of gently rounded, softly furred animal-children extend Underwood’s brief text. Quiet doesn’t necessarily equal sedate, though; both words and pictures also incorporate winter-themed humor. “Knocking with mittens quiet” shows two rabbits at a door, one of whom clearly needs to pee; for “Nutcracker quiet” half an audience is engrossed in the ballet while the other half snoozes; for “Mistletoe quiet” a wide-eyed lamb faces a porcupine, a sprig of mistletoe atop its spiky head. Young audiences will relate to the emotions, from a Nativity play’s “Forgotten line quiet” (followed by “Helpful whisper quiet”) to “Hoping for a snow day quiet” (two bunnies riveted to the radio) to “Listening for sleigh bells quiet” (pictured on the cover of this issue of the Horn Book). JENNIFER M. BRABANDER

A Pirate’s Twelve  Days of Christmas
by Philip Yates; illus. by Sebastià Serra
Primary Sterling 40 pp.
10/12 978-1-4027-9225-0 $14.95
“On the fourth day of Christmas, a gift was sent to me: / 4 cacklin’ hens / 3 black cats, 2 cutlasses, an’ a parrot in a palm tree.” Sure, it’s a mouthful (and there are eight days to go!), but this pirate crew is having such a grand time you’ll get into the swashbuckling spirit in no time. Back for their second holiday high-seas adventure (A Pirate’s Night Before Christmas, rev. 11/08), the Black Sark buccaneers plan twelve days of Yuletide surprises for their cabin boy. The pirate lingo and raucously detailed color-rich illustrations add seafaring flair to this holiday standard. KITTY FLYNN

How Do Dinosaurs  Say Happy Chanukah?
by Jane Yolen; illus. by Mark Teague
Preschool, Primary Blue Sky/Scholastic 32 pp.
9/12 978-0-545-41677-1 $16.99

How Do Dinosaurs  Say Merry Christmas?
by Jane Yolen; illus. by Mark Teague
Preschool, Primary Blue Sky/Scholastic 32 pp.
9/12 978-0-545-41678-8 $16.99
Yolen and Teague’s mischievous dinos (How Do Dinosaurs Say Good Night? among many others) tackle holiday traditions and observances. Both books first depict the dinosaurs (with their human parents) modeling bad behavior. Chanukah shows the creatures peeking at presents, blowing out candles, and hoarding dreidels. Christmas finds the dinos un-decorating the tree, licking candy canes, and feasting on Santa’s cookies. By mid-book, in each case, the dinosaurs have settled down to demonstrate proper decorum. Bouncy rhymes and humorous illustrations—the images of vivacious large-scale dinosaurs alongside the staid, rather Rockwellian humans are consistently funny—combine to make welcome entries in Yolen and Teague’s Dinosaurs series and in holiday book collections. ELISSA GERSHOWITZ

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Review of The McElderry Book of Mother Goose

Joanna Rudge Long — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 19:00:25 +0000

The McElderry Book  of Mother Goose: Revered and Rare Rhymes
compiled by Petra Mathers;  illus. by the compiler
Primary, Intermediate    McElderry    96 pp.
8/12    978-0-689-85605-1    $21.99
e-book ed. 978-1-4424-5314-2    $12.99
Not since Leonard Marcus’s Mother Goose’s Little Misfortunes (rev. 11/90) has there been such a delightfully idiosyncratic selection. Drawn mostly from the canonical Opies (see “Sources”), Mathers’s fifty-seven entries include many lesser-known or longer rhymes (some “sad and scary”), all nicely leavened with such familiar nonsense as “Hey Diddle Diddle.” Here are puzzles (“I Saw a Fishpond All on Fire”); tongue twisters and verbal nonsense (“The Great Panjandrum”); stories tragic (“poor babes in the wood”) and comic (a peddler sells a woman “the piece he’d purloined” from her own petticoat). Several are lyrical (“seventeen times as high as the moon”) or mysterious (“tell my mother I shall never come back”). Vocabulary is unstinted (counting down “Ten Little Penguins”: “One got in chancery”). The delicate wit of Mathers’s watercolors and the generous spaces where her characters appear enable creative interpretation—Cock Robin’s funeral is a cooperative venture amongst the birds; Hector Protector, “dressed all in green,” is green himself: he’s a frog. Dr. Fell’s disgruntled patient, a dog, has a bandaged foot and a plastic Elizabethan collar. Mathers’s expressive figures, in many moods, are effectively counterpointed by touches of dramatic, or pensive, landscape. Pair this with the Opie/Sendak I Saw Esau (rev. 9/92) for a feast of traditional rhymes.

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Face Out: Picture Book Covers

Leonard S. Marcus — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 16:25:34 +0000

A recent conversation about the current state of the picture book soon came around to the subject of book jackets. A senior art director in the group noted mournfully that as jacket designs have increasingly become the province of sales and marketing teams, covers have grown less representative of the books they trumpet. The disconnect can take different forms. The typeface chosen for the cover may be out of sync with that used for the interior text, and the cover graphic may be a noisy attention-grabber there to announce, “I am a big, important book, so buy me!” The eye-popping cover image of Robert Byrd’s Electric Ben: The Amazing Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (Dial), for example, is like a souped-up, funny-car version of the capable, but far quieter, artwork found inside the book. Additionally, the trim size may be larger than feels right for the story told: The Further Tale of Peter Rabbit (Warne), by Emma Thompson, with illustrations by Eleanor Taylor, inhabits a much bigger format than Beatrix Potter’s original, the better to make the book show up on store shelves but not, I wouldn’t think, to draw small children into Peter’s furtive, hazard-filled, hide-and-seek world.

The jacket as a selling tool, rather than as merely the protective wrapper (or “dust jacket”) it started out as more than a century ago, is hardly a new phenomenon. But as the major market for children’s books shifted from libraries and schools to retail from the 1970s onward, and as the publishing industry itself went corporate and redrew its organizational chart, cover designs rooted in editorial vision became a good deal rarer. Jackets produced as a group decision, with the marketing and sales force of the house taking the lead, became the new norm.

A devil’s advocate might interject here that children tend to love glittery lettering, shiny Mylar surfaces, and gold tinsel spines; and if amusing cheap tricks like these lead to a love of reading, why complain? Even if there is a disconnect between a book’s content and its cover design, does that really matter? I would say that it matters whenever the result is a book that feels sadly at war with itself (the oversized Peter Rabbit “sequel,” for example); and when a certain kind of cozy, intimate book for which there has long been a proven place falls by the wayside. The cover designs of Don Freeman’s Norman the Doorman (Viking) and Esphyr Slobodkina’s Caps for Sale (Harper) — to name two mid-twentieth-century picture books that attained “classic” status in time to withstand the current trend — would be unlikely to pass muster at any of today’s major publishing houses. True, both of these books date from the time when a new picture book was typically encountered up-close on a library shelf or table, not glimpsed at forty paces in a big box store, amid a crazy quilt of color-splashed alternatives. But whatever the market forces that happen to be at work, if the picture book as a genre is to thrive in the future, publishers will need to make books that have more to offer, from the cover on in, than calculated cleverness.

Consider two of the most beloved picture books of all time. What, besides their publisher (Harper) and editor (the late great Ursula Nordstrom), do Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are have in common? Stylistically, their illustrations look nothing alike and their story lines could hardly be more different. Still, these two perennial favorites do share one striking feature—and it is a pretty strange one when you stop to think about it: in both instances, the hero of the tale does not appear on the cover.

In a preliminary jacket sketch for Goodnight Moon, Clement Hurd painted a more static version of the cover image of the Great Green Room everyone knows. It’s pretty much the same design, except that in the sketch the bunny child perches on the windowsill, at the center of the picture. In the finished cover, the bunny has gone missing.

Nearly all picture book covers make it their first order of business to introduce readers to the hero of the tale; it seems only good sense to do so. But when it was time to finalize the cover for Goodnight Moon, Nordstrom took a counterintuitive approach that reflected her understanding of the text’s mantra-like magic string of words. It was she who instructed Hurd to take out the bunny.

Nordstrom’s argument went something like this. The bunny was not a hero in the ordinary sense but rather a placeholder for the child at home who, swept up in the spell of Margaret Wise Brown’s hypnotic lyric, would want to imagine himself inside the Great Green Room. The story, she told the illustrator, wasn’t really the bunny’s story. Viewed this way, the jacket image came to serve as a door left open for the reader to enter the room.

But what about Where the Wild Things Are? Did Nordstrom, or Maurice Sendak, omit Max from the cover image for similar reasons? The situation is not quite comparable. Max, after all, is arguably the quintessential picture-book hero. The archival record does not seem to account for what happened. We know that Max does not make an appearance in any of the several Wild Things cover studies preserved at Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum & Library, which houses Sendak’s archives. But we don’t know why, and so can only guess what Sendak and Nordstrom were thinking. My guess would be this: the cover image was meant to be another open door, and a signal to readers that they were going to have to venture inside—inside the book and inside themselves — if they wished to have what the cover art promised would be a strange and wonderful experience. This was a cover to daydream over, not art to digest in an instant. And I doubt it would make it past any present-day publishing committee.

Which is not to say that a cover has to be quiet and contemplative to rate as a success. Fred Marcellino came to picture-book making in the early 1990s at the tail end of a brilliant run as America’s preeminent trade fiction jacket artist of the previous two decades. Chances are great that at some point you have been stopped in your tracks by the indelible graphics he created for Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and a host of other international bestsellers. No one knew better than Marcellino how to create a book jacket that made a big splash while also giving an incisive impression of the experience that lay in store for readers.

The funny thing is that when Marcellino turned to designing the cover of his first picture book, Puss in Boots (Farrar), a project he had dreamed of doing for years, he painted an irresistibly saucy, elegant close-up of the story’s egomaniacal cat — but forgot to leave room for the title or his name. Marcellino’s editor, Michael di Capua, came to the rescue with a bold solution that, he later reported, had been revealed to him in a dream: to leave the front cover entirely type-free. The graphically thrilling result, which set the stage for a trickster tale famous for its own surprising twists and turns, became the most talked-about juvenile cover design in recent memory. A second result was that Puss’s text-free headshot went on to inspire a Mount Rushmore of monumentally large — but overbearing and for the most part humorless — copycat jackets, especially for picture book biographies of JFK, Helen Keller, and other famous folk: the ultimate I’m-a-big-important-book covers. Which only goes to show that, whatever form it takes, the best picture book cover design is made from the inside out, as a strong, clear, highly particular response to a one-of-a-kind story worth discovering.

From the November/December 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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