Otis and Rae and the Grumbling Splunk by Laura and Leo Espinosa

by Tom B.

Otis and Rae is a book that I always enjoy recommending to other parents for two reasons – 1). It’s a fun read, and 2). it’s a relatively unknown title. I don’t know anyone else in my immediate circle who has it or has even heard of it, our whole county library system only has 4 copies of it, and even the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” suggestions on its Amazon page only has four other suggestions total (as opposed to the 17 pages of suggestions for other titles). So, yes, it gives me that heady hipster-esque rush that comes with saying “well, you probably haven’t heard of it”, which is a really repugnant, self-satisfied emotion to indulge in. But don’t take my horrific moral failings out on Otis and Rae. It’s a very cool picture book with some really interesting things going for it.

Otis and Rae and the Grumbling Splunk

Otis and Rae and the Grumbling Splunk

Published in 2008 by Houghton Mifflin, Otis and Rae and the Grumbling Splunk by Laura and Leo Espinosa is all about two best friends who set out on their “very first camping trip ever”, tramping out into the forest for a fun night of telling ghost stories and eating PB&B sandwiches. (Otis is a big fan of peanut butter and banana sandwiches.) Around the campfire, the ever-cheerful Rae tells stories of the mysterious Grumbling Splunk – a huge creature that grumbles like a freight train – who, apparently, haunts the nearby woods. The tales of the Splunk freak Otis out and, after he accidentally runs into the Splunk at night, Rae happily runs off in pursuit of the creature and Otis, in turn, runs off after Rae. The two friends eventually find the Splunk and realize that his size and tendency to grumble might have given them the wrong impression.

I discovered Otis and Rae and the Grumbling Splunk at a new and used book sale at my office, and I immediately dug its design and format. The world of Otis and Rae evokes a design aesthetic that fans of Sanrio (i.e. Hello Kitty) or the cuter creatures of Hayao Miyazaki (think My Neighbor Totoro) should really enjoy, but the characters aren’t totally Japanese inspired. They just tap into that ultra-cute, big-head design school that Japanese pop culture does so well. Illustrator Leo Espinosa has found a way to really evoke that “cute balanced with hand-drawn personality” style that you can really see on display in Sanrio, Uglydolls, Nick Jr’s Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!, or the stuffed animals at your local IKEA. If that aesthetic appeals to your child, they will really respond to this book.

Otis and Rae and The Grumbling Splunk

Onwards towards the Splunk....

The other thing that I really like about Otis and Rae is that it is a terrific hybrid of a picture book and a comic book. About 60% of the book is structured like a traditional picture book – illustrations with text above or underneath – and the rest uses the panel design, sound effects, and word balloon structure of a comic book. The format is really dynamic and engaging, and the simple, easy-to-read text makes this an excellent transitional title to help young readers get used to the comic format.

My daughter is getting more and more interested in comic books and, to be honest, with many comics, the format is too cluttered and the word balloon text is just too small for a learning reader to follow without getting easily confused. (As a parent, even though I LOVE comics, I’ll admit that trying to read those kinds of comics to your kid can be a real pain in the butt.) However, I think Otis and Rae introduces kids to the rules and structure of a comic book in a very gradual, clever way, showing off a design style that elegantly bridges the gap between picture books and comic books. [read the rest of the post…]

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Friday Miscellany: Resources to Help You Build a Home Library

by Tom B.

It’s Friday, so I thought I’d take a break from obsessing over my own collection of books and share with you a few links, videos, and other resources that might help you start building your own library of awesome kids titles.

For starters, keeping with September’s apparent theme of “new works from massively iconic children’s lit authors”, a new Dr. Seuss book was released this week – The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories, a collection of short illustrated pieces that Seuss originally created for magazines decades ago. (New Sendak, new Shel Silverstein, new Seuss – this September has been amazing month for kids lit… and alliteration.)  The book was assembled by self-proclaimed “Seuss-o-logist” Charles Cohen and this video explains how the volume came to be

So, obviously, The Bippolo Seed looks like a killer addition for your home library if your kids are big Seuss fans.

In terms of general library building:

  • If you’re concerned about the price of building a home library – books ain’t cheap – this Nesting.com article by Terry Doherty has some decent guidelines for getting the most bang for your buck when it comes to tracking down books for your kids. We’re going to have some similar articles on this topic posted to the blog soon – specifically about my love of finding cheap lots of 1970s Sesame Street Book Club books on eBay.
  • And, finally, even though the link looks NSFW, ANY true book-freak will go MENTAL checking out the images on the Bookshelf Porn Tumblr page, which has created a gallery of some of the most amazing, drool-worthy bookshelves you’ve ever seen. Seriously, book fans, prepare to ache with envy.

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This Book Actually Exists: The Truax – A Parody of The Lorax from the National Oak Flooring Association

by Tom B.

Truax

I am the Truax, I speak for the hardwood flooring industry….

It’s a sad fact of being a parent, but sometimes, for reasons I can’t explain, you will find inexplicably awful books appearing on your kid’s bookshelf. Usually, it’s just a crappy movie tie-in or a flea market oddity or a Burger King promotional item, but sometimes you find something really, truly odd.

Case in point – one day, while on vacation, I found my 4-year-old daughter perusing a worn copy of Truax, a weird pamphlet of a picture book, published in 1995, that is supposed to be an eye-opening rebuttal of Dr. Seuss’ classic environmental fable, The Lorax.

However, unlike Theodore Geisel, the creators of Truax didn’t rely on some stuffy, tree-hugging publishing company like Random House to release their iconic children’s tale. Instead, they wisely chose a more fair and impartial partnership to bring their story to the masses – The Truax was published “through a cooperative effort of the Hardwood Forest Association and the National Oak Flooring Manufacturers Association.”  That’s right. Because if you want a balanced, agenda-free look at the logging industry, there’s, of course, no better source for information than the National Oak Flooring Manufacturers Association.

(In related news, after hours of intense debate, my mom has named me Handsomest Dude in Town. I thank her for her calm, fact-based assessment.)

My daughter found Truax – the title is just “Truax”, not “The Truax,” which sounds much better – at the bottom of a toy chest in an old family cottage in northern Michigan and, when asked what she was reading, she shook her head and said, “I don’t know. I’m very confused.”  And I don’t blame her.

Truax is an odd little attempt at parody from people who obviously felt slighted by Dr. Seuss’ portrayal of the logging industry as a bunch of mean ol’ Once-lers in The Lorax. Is it amateurish? Heck yeah – it looks like it was written and drawn by the people who create kids menus for knock-off Big Boy hamburger chains – but the people creating it were, in fact, amateurs, so it’s a little hard to fault them for not having Seuss’ virtuoso skill with words and images. But, don’t worry, dear readers, there are a lot of other faults that you CAN hold against the Truax team. [read the rest of the post…]

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Mercy Watson to the Rescue by Kate DiCamillo, illustrated by Chris Van Dusen

by Tom B.

Before I start my discussion of Mercy Watson to the Rescue – which, by the way, is an exceptionally good book – I’m going to get into an annoyingly pedantic discussion of children’s book categories. Why? Because one big part of collecting books for your child is figuring out what books are appropriate for your kid at what age.

Mercy Watson to the Rescue

Mercy Watson to the Rescue

And I’m not talking about subject matter. Generally, you don’t have to worry about boobs, blood, and salty language until you get into later-age YA fiction. (Unless there are some really awesome picture books that no one has turned me onto yet. Clue me in, guys. I’m cool.) I’m talking about format – how many pages, what’s the text-to-picture ratio, how big is the font, how long is the story, etc. Different formats work best at different stages along your child’s development as a reader. There are lots of categories and terms for these books – some are used often, some less so, some are interchangeable, some are used incorrectly… it can be a huge pain. (If you’re really not interested in reading a brief aside about children’s book types, scan down a bit and I’ll say “BORING PART OVER” when I’m done.)

There are easy readers (sometimes called “I Can Read” books), beginning readers, middle readers, transitional readers, chapter books, young adult books – the list goes on and on. Since my daughter is almost five, we’ve had limited interaction with some of these book types so far, particularly the ones above her current reading level. We have TONS of picture books. (Almost literally tons.) Over the past year, we’ve spent a lot of time getting comfortable with easy readers. And we even have a few younger-skewing YA novels (mostly the works of Roald Dahl) that we’ve read aloud during bedtimes (plus whole shelves of YA novels that can be classified under the “Books My Kid Will One Day Read” category).

If I had to pick a category that we’ve explored the least so far, it’d be chapter books, but I bet that’s going to change a lot over the next year. Chapter books are story-books that are normally targeted at 6 to 10 year olds, and they’re sort of mini large-print novels. They’re short novellas with a relatively large font size and a much higher emphasis on text than images. (All chapter books have illustrations.) They’re the next step up from easy readers and, typically, they’re broken into frequent chapters to help hold the attention span of the reader and make it easier to check in and out if the reader can’t finish the whole book in a single sitting. (As I describe them, they sound a lot like Dan Brown novels… but better.)

BORING PART OVER! – At the moment, our favorite chapter books come from Kate DiCamillo’s Mercy Watson series, which began with the fantastic Mercy Watson to the Rescue. In the world of chapter books, the Mercy Watson series skews pretty young – Chris Van Dusen produces so many expressive, polished, retro-styled paintings to accompany each book that, at times, they resemble longer picture books – but the stories are so simple yet sophisticated that many different age groups can enjoy the series. An eight-year-old would get a kick out of reading them and, I can attest from past experience, a four-year-old loves having them read to her. A lot of that has to do with Kate DiCamillo’s talent as a writer.

Once you start collecting books for your children – or even regularly checking books out for them at your library – you will very, very quickly start to develop a list of “must-read” authors. These are the authors who are so good so consistently that you’ll find yourself going back to them again and again. We have a couple of must-reads at our house. It’s very hard to go wrong with Mo Willems, Maurice Sendak, Lane Smith, Julia Donaldson, William Steig, Doreen Cronin… the list goes on and on. Kate DiCamillo is definitely on our “must-read” author list too. [read the rest of the post…]

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Little Lit: It Was Dark and Silly Night…

by Tom B.

Little Lit: It Was a Dark and Silly Night

Little Lit: It Was a Dark and Silly Night....

Parents: If you haven’t heard of Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s Little Lit books yet, man-oh-man, are you missing out. Little Lit is an extremely cool series of kid-focused comics anthologies, all organized around a specific theme. There have been three volumes so far – Folklore & Fairy Tale Funnies, Strange Stories for Strange Kids, and It Was a Dark and Silly Night – and one collected volume of the whole series so far called Big Fat Little Lit. Each volume has attracted a murderer’s row of amazing writers and illustrators as contributors – people like David Sedaris, Ian Falconer, Maurice Sendak, Crockett Johnson, Chris Ware, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, Jules Feiffer, Neil Gaiman, William Joyce, Lewis Trondheim, Lemony Snicket, Spiegelman himself, and lots, lots more.

It’s a breathtaking collection of talent and we’ve already got two Little Lit volumes on my “Books My Kid Will Read in the Future” shelf. (Expect full breakdowns on them in the future. I’ve got a whole comics themed week of entries planned for sometime in October.) The stories skew a bit older than my daughter – I think a 7 or 8-year-old would think they were the coolest books they’ve ever seen – but there are a few stories that I think I could get away reading with my 4-year-old at the moment, namely David Sedaris and Ian Falconer’s Shrek-esque team-up “Pretty Ugly.” (After Squirrel Meets Chipmunk, I definitely want a full-on twisted kids’ book from Sedaris and Falconer sometime in the near future.)

I was reminded of the Little Lit series today thanks to Neil Gaiman’s new Tumblr blog where he posted an animated version of his contribution to the It Was a Dark and Silly Night volume (illustrated by the great Gahan Wilson) that was adapted by director Steven-Charles Jaffe.

Check it out below and get a taste of the chaotic fun of the Little Lit books.

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Reader Recommendation of the Week: Iggy Peck, Architect by Andrea Beaty, illustrated by David Roberts

by Tom B.

Iggy Peck, Architect

Iggy Peck, Architect is next on our reading list

One of the core reasons for this blog existing is that, selfishly, I really want to know what other people’s kids are reading, and I really, really want recommendations for great kids’ books that haven’t crossed our path yet. We got some great submissions last week – which was very cool, since the blog has only existed for a week, so thanks for the charity, dear readers – but one stood out for me as an early favorite. Based on a recommendation from my lovely friend Megan McKnight, the next book we’re hunting for is Iggy Peck, Architect by Andrea Beaty, illustrated by David Roberts.

(Or maybe we’re just going borrow it from Megan or… ooh, our local library has it… oh, OK, we’re totally getting this book now.)

According to the description of the book:

Iggy has one passion: building. His parents are proud of his fabulous creations, though they’re sometimes surprised by his materials. But hey! What’s wrong with a tower built of diapers? (Even dirty ones!)

Dear Ig has it made until second grade. That’s when he meets his match. His teacher, Miss Lila Greer, frowns upon architecture. Banned from building in school, second grade becomes a bore until one day a fateful field trip lets Iggy Peck show the world his true talents!

It was named one of Time Magazine’s Top Children’s Books of 2007 and won a Parents’ Choice Silver Honor Award. And, more importantly, it looks very cool. I LOVE the graphic paper backgrounds to Iggy’s illustrations. And, coincidentally, I recently had a long conversation with my daughter trying to explain what an architect does. We have lots of books about the actual construction process – “Biff Builds a House” and so on – but we haven’t encountered many that actually get into the planning/artistic inspiration aspects of what architects do.

On the author’s website, you can find some great sample pages and other resources if you’re interested.

So, thanks Megan for the suggestion! If anyone else has suggestions for what we should try to read next, just email me and pass it on.

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Every Thing On It: Celebrating the Legacy of Shel Silverstein

by Tom B.

This September has been an oddly momentous month for children’s literature – first, we got the publication of Bumble-Ardy, Maurice Sendak’s first new illustrated and authored children’s story in 30 years, and then, if that wasn’t enough, this week, we get the release of Every Thing On It, a brand-new collection of 130 previously unreleased poems and drawings from the late, great Shel Silverstein, only the second “new” collection of Silverstein’s work to be released since his death in 1999. Talk about an embarrassment of riches.

Every Thing On It by Shel Silverstein

What a great September

My family is particularly excited about Every Thing On It. Shel Silverstein is a master of language, particularly in using language to speak directly into the brain stems of eager children. We started reading to my daughter from A Light in the Attic and Where the Sidewalk Ends when she was three years old and, at first, I really didn’t think that my daughter was going to have the patience to sit and listen to poetry being read to her. It just seemed very… abstract, esoteric, it didn’t seem to have the immediacy of a picture book. I thought she’d be bored. However, once we got started, I quickly realized a profound and universal truth – I get things wrong ALL THE TIME. (Take a note, dear readers. That truth is going to come up again and again on this blog.)

Me being horribly, pig-headedly, stupendously WRONG has occurred multiple times during my brief tenure as a parent so far, and it has almost always involved situations where I completely underestimate my kid. Reading Shel Silverstein was one of those situations. She LOVED the poems. She was quiet, attentive, enraptured. After the second night of reading a selection of Shel poems before bed, she had already MEMORIZED some of the shorter ones. It was uncanny, and it really speaks to Silverstein’s ninja-like virtuosity with words and images and how he was able to use that skill to engage whole generations of young readers. For an author with the, hands down, scariest back-cover photo in the history of children’s lit, Shel Silverstein was a tremendous friend and ally to kids all over the world, speaking to them – never speaking down to them – with such depth, sophistication, and a sense of fun that they couldn’t help but love the guy.

So, in honor of the publication of Every Thing On It, here are two classic videos of Shel doing what he does best, entertaining everyone around him.

The first video is an extremely cool  clip of Shel appearing on The Johnny Cash Show back in 1970 where he does a few songs, including a duet with Cash (Silverstein wrote the lyrics to one of Cash’s most famous songs “A Boy Named Sue”). The second video is an animated clip of Shel reading “Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me Too” from Where the Sidewalk Ends, which is one of my daughter’s favorite poems. Enjoy.

 

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Bats at the Library by Brian Lies

by Tom B.

I’ve spent a lot of time hunting down books to add to my daughter’s collection and, hands down, one of the best parts of that experience is stumbling upon a book that I’ve never heard of before and slowly and suddenly realizing… “Oh, this is a good one.” You just get hit with this wave on unexpected pleasure, the sort of heady ego-boost that comes from accidentally finding yourself exposed to, what seems like, secret knowledge. “Oh, I’ve found a very, very good book here. And I didn’t hear about it from a friend or from a book review or a librarian… I found it MYSELF. I’m the person who gets to tell everyone I know about this one.” Don’t ask me why. But it gives me a little shot of endorphins, which is really, really sad.

Bats at the Library by Brian Lies

Bats at the Library

This was my experience with being introduced to Bats at the Library by Brian Lies, a completely sensational picture book, all about a charming colony of bats expressing their love for their local library. Remember that smug little sense of self-importance I spoke of earlier? I was totally awash in that sensation when my daughter and I discovered Bats at the Library in the remains of a very picked-over children’s section in a going out-of-business bookstore back in March. And, trust me, that hipster-esque ego charge of finding a book that “you probably haven’t heard of” becomes even more sad when you later realize that, even though you’ve never heard of it personally, the book in question was a best-seller (12 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list) and a major award winner (won the 2010 Bill Martin, Jr. Picture Book Award, among other prizes). It’s like bragging that you found this great new little boutique called “Target” that you just can’t wait to show to all your friends.

But, regardless of my lame personal hang-ups and constant need for affirmation, Bats at the Library has become a big favorite in our household on its merits alone. The basic premise is simple – a group of bored bats are excited to discover that a window has been left open at the town’s library, so the colony heads over for an impromptu “Bat Night at the library!” The good-natured, excitable bats (think Stellaluna, only cuter) have a grand old time, playing with the overhead projectors, splashing around in the water fountain, exploring pop-up books, and reading, reading, reading. Lies is a masterful artist – his playful, detail-packed paintings remind me of the great David Wiesner – and, in Bats at the Library, his verse is almost just as equally well-executed. His rhyming lines balance the bats’ cheeky excitement with a real reverence for the pleasures of reading. To quote the bats at the end of their adventure: [read the rest of the post…]

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Kids’ Books for Grown-Ups: Space Oddity and Movies R Fun

by Tom B.

Go the F**k to Sleep

We’ve all been there….

If the runaway success of Adam Mansbach’s Go the F**k to Sleep has taught us anything – other than the fact that profanely begging your kid to go to bed is, apparently, a strangely universal experience – it’s that there is a definite market for kids’ books that are really for grown-ups. Yes, they might look like lavish children’s tomes with their 32 pages of lushly rendered illustrations, but, c’mon, there are two different picture books based on Bob Dylan songs. NO kids were asking Santa for those books. Those were for the parents.

And I get it. These “kids’ books for grown-ups” exist for two main reasons. First, there’s total value in parents wanting to share something that they love with their kids. Even though it’s not my cup of tea, I totally get why a die-hard Dylan fan would cherish a kid-friendly way to introduce their offspring to “Forever Young.” And, second, there’s something just inherently hilarious about something that looks like it’s for kids, but really, it’s got a secret grown-up dirty side. (It’s the reason why there’s almost nothing as funny as watching a toddler say the f-word.)

There are a lot of these kinds of books out there, but I thought I’d share two of my favorites.

Space Oddity

Major Tom, you’ve really made the grade…

First up, illustrator Andrew Kolb‘s ridiculously cool picture book version of the classic David Bowie song “Space Oddity”. Yes, that “Space Oddity” – Ground control to Major Tom, take your protein pills, and put your helmet on…. Kolb turned Bowie’s optimistically tragic space anthem into an epic modernist picture book for kids that he originally released as a free download on his website. However, EMI and the rights holders for “Space Oddity,” perhaps a wee bit predictably, brought down the hammer on Kolb and the download link is no more. The artwork is still up on Kolb’s site, sans lyrics and labeled now as “Space Picture Book”, with a note that specifies “[t]his is merely a concept and no physical form of this book will be made until all involved approve of the collaboration.”

But you can still browse through a copy of the original version of Kolb’s book on Wired.com’s Underwire blog here, and they even provide a link, so you can play Bowie’s song while you read.

[Author’s aside: Thanks to the movie Labyrinth, my daughter is OBSESSED with David Bowie. She loves him – loves “Magic Dance,” loves “Rebel, Rebel”… she’s a big fan. In a misguided attempt to foster her newfound Bowie love, I burned her a CD with a bunch of Bowie hits without, admittedly, really looking at the songs I was putting on there. So, while driving to swim class one day, I was suddenly hit with a barrage of very urgent, very worried questions from the back seat about what exactly was happening to Major Tom. The song has since migrated its way off the mix CD.] [read the rest of the post…]

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Never Smile at a Monkey: And 17 Other Important Things to Remember by Steve Jenkins

by Tom B.

Finding good nonfiction books for children under five is a tricky business. Granted, there are a lot of DK Publishing “visual guides” to different subjects and, when you weed out the glorified sticker books, some of them are pretty good. (We’re particularly fond of an “Oceans” book we picked up at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium.) I’m a big believer in having lots of big, picture-filled reference works or coffee table books lying around the house, just waiting for a kid to start flipping through them. Provided that the subject matter is appropriate – “The Visual Guide to Nazi Panzer Tanks” or “Autopsies in Detroit: A History” should probably be kept on higher shelves – I think those over-sized, glossy photo books act as a really alluring windows out into the world for little kids – even though, for the most part, the text from those photo books is going to be completely lost on them, thanks to both its reading level and often miniscule font size.

Never Smile at a Monkey by Steve Jenkins

Never Smile at a Monkey by Steve Jenkins

Even the DK books are fairly hard to read. They’re great to browse or to search for a specific fact, but the text can be small and dense and, for a first grade or younger child, who is more used to the traditional picture book reading experience, trying to sit down and read what is, ostensibly, a reference book is going to be next to impossible. (Trust me, I make reference books for a living. They’re not made to be read in one sitting.)

So it’s rare (in my limited experience) to find nonfiction works that can actually appeal to young readers in the same way as a traditional picture book, and that’s why I hold Steve Jenkins in such high regard. Jenkins is an artist and author who makes the coolest science books for kids you’ve ever seen. It’s probably not even accurate to call them simply “science books.” Jenkins is, first and foremost, a hell of an artist, and he creates these intricately rad paper collages to illustrate the wonders of the natural world. He’s an artist-biologist, but his picture books also have this very specific and very kid-focused way that he presents his facts, which makes them perfect for young readers.

His nature books don’t read like encyclopedias – they read like books, really engaging picture books, and you can tell from even just his titles that he knows how to hook in young readers. His books include such titles as What Do You Do When Something Wants To Eat You?; What Do You Do with a Tail Like This?; How Many Ways Can You Catch a Fly?; and Biggest, Strongest, Fastest; to name a few. Our favorite Jenkins’ book is the amazingly-titled Never Smile at a Monkey: And 17 Other Important Things to Remember, and it’s a staple in our home library. [read the rest of the post…]

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