Sometimes being the sole content creator for a book review blog that covers books from picture to adult and both fiction and nonfiction (with sometimes a graphic novel thrown in) can seem like Whack A Mole. It feels like there's always some genre being neglected. With me it tends to be picture books. So, with a long weekend on the horizon, here's a round up of some treasures for younger readers and listeners.
Canine loving kids will adore Aria Mia Loberti's I Am Ingrid: The Adventures of the World's Greatest Dog. Okay, the author may be a bit biased. After all that's her service dog 🐕🦺 she's writing about.
Readers meet Ingrid as a puppy. They follow her intensive training with a family. There are so many skills she must learn a,and temptations she must resist! She even has to know when to disobey an order.
Finally Ingrid meets her person, Aria, and they are trained to work together.
Service dogs these days enable people with a wide range of disabilities to live independently. Who knows? Maybe reading I Am Ingrid will inspire some kids to help to train them.
Cat loving youngsters will adore Natalia Shaloshvili's What A Small Cat Needs. It's picture purrrfect for anything from library story times to home bedtime 🌙 read alouds.
The blue eyed cat with her textured fur and wistful expression is totally irresistible. The text is simple but the lyrical and tender.
And the ending is guaranteed to put smiles on children's faces.
In Dan Gil's No More Chairs a true childhood memory becomes a tribute to friendship and willingness to take a stand.
A teacher's students ask him about an empty chair in the classroom. He answers the question with a story from his childhood. He and his best friend, Archie, dressed up in their Sunday best for a birthday 🎂 party 🥳 🎉. They were really looking forward to seeing friends, playing games, and eating cake...
...but when the birthday boy's mother answered the door she said only Daniel could come in. There wasn't a chair for Archie.
No More Chairs carries a message that is sadly all too relevant decades after the party.
In contrast the setting of Mychal Threets' I'm So Happy You're Here: A Celebration of Library Joy is a place where everyone is welcome. A librarian welcomes a diverse group of library kids and their parents and shows them around.
"The library is for you,
A place where you'll always belong."
The children learn about the many library services that go way beyond lending books and are invited to get the most special card they'll ever have.
These days when libraries and librarians are endangered by everything from book banning to funding cuts this reminder of the value and importance of public libraries couldn't possibly be more timely.
Margaret Renkl's The Weedy Garden is a glorious tribute to the beauty that can be found in less than perfect spaces. A child visits a weedy garden where:
*bumblebees pollinate
*monarch butterflies look for places to lay eggs
*a rabbit 🐇 protects her babies
*a chipmunk hunts for nuts and seeds
*and many other creatures live their lives.
The text is lyrical. The pictures are gorgeous. And at the end there are instructions for how kids can make their own weedy gardens.
A Not Is Not A Tangle
Today's kids are growing up in a world of planned obsolescence. Fast food, fast fashion, fast everything. Daniel Nayeri's A Knot Is Not A Tangle introduces them to an item made with care by hand and destined to be cherished for the memories it evokes.
A boy and his grandmother are going to replace a rug she and her grandmother had crafted. They get wool from his sheep tending grandfather, wash it, card it, spin it, dye it, and weave it into a rug following a design they've created.
Of course this process is not feasible for most American family. Most residential areas are not zoned for sheep herding. But people who can sew, weave, knit, and crochet can make and mend clothes and other useful items. Shopping at yard sales and thrift shops and organizing swap events keeps useful and often beautiful items out of our too quickly filling landfills. Although I wouldn't recommend dumpster diving for kids, it can yield real treasures.
And today people are fighting for their right to repair, rather than replace, big ticket items like cars and electronics.
The Orono Public Library's children's garden club meets once a week in the growing season. I am their beloved paparazzi. Sometimes they do crafts. This week they were learning to weave. It was so much fun they let we join in. Perhaps if more kids have experiences like that things will change for the better.
If you are a parent or educator how can you enhance children's drive to create and hold onto beloved objects?
Snow Angel, Sand Angel
"Snow Angel, Sand Angel is a book about different worlds, and how we imagine each other. In recent times, as has always been the case, the ability to imagine each other, to imagine the fullness, richness, and truth of another life, is ever more necessary and rare...Snow Angel, Sand Angel is about the act of imagining other people's worlds, and how we can make these worlds our own--and seeing how much like home a far away place can be." Christopher Myers.
Claire's class is studying the seasons. They're going to make dioramas. Claire is upset when she gets winter. Living in Hawaii she's never seen snow. When her father takes her to the top of Mauna Kea it's a big let down.
"Someday, I will open my back door, run through a yard piled high with white snow, and never get altitude sickness. We won't have to drive miles and miles up a winding road between grey and black lava fields, fallen 'ohi'a lehuq trees, and patches of scrub grass just to get to the snow."
Fortunately a family beach trip leads to an epiphany and a change of heart.
Author Lois-Ann Yamanaka based the story on her childhood longing to experience the real snow she saw in ubiquitous Christmas media.
Personally, after living in New England all my life I'd trade snow for beach access in a New York minute.
I See Color
"When people say, I don't see color,' they think it means they don't discriminate against others for how they look. But using this phrase means that the experiences of people of color, their humanness, and the everyday effects of racism are ignored.
Because not seeing a person's color erases a big part of who that person is."
In I See Color: An Affirmation And Celebration of Our Diverse World the authors assure young readers that it's fine to notice color just as they notice other human attributes, say height and hair texture. The text is a celebration of activists fighting for a wide range of causes. Some are quite well known, for example, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Some much less so. Anne and Carl Braden endured violence and jail time for helping a Black family get a home in a white neighborhood. Some, like Malcolm X, conducted their activism in the past. Others, like the Black Lives Matter founders, are very much with us today.
I See Color is a real eye opener. Not only kids, but a lot of adults, could learn a lot from it. I know I did.
Well I hope that this round-up helps the balance of my book coverage a little. I'll do my best to include more picture books in the future.
On a purrrsonal note, I was reading last week tthat the slow publishing season is ending. Soon a lot more books are going to be dropping. Did it fill my heart with joy? Nope. More like panic. Increasing numbers of books meets decreasing amount of time available for reading. Don't get me wrong. I love reading. I really enjoy the awesome books that I'm lucky enough to have access to read and review. But my green TBR notebook is a nightmare. I have trouble deciding the best books to read and recommend because there are so many good ones coming out all the time now.
A great big shout out goes out to you, my readers, for whom I do it all.
Jules Hathaway
