reading aloud

I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen

by Tom B.

I Want My Hat Back

He just wants his hat back. Is that so wrong?

One of my favorite things about reading books to my daughter is that, through the process of reading out loud, she learns so much about not just language, but also things like intonation, context, sarcasm, and all of those other glorious abstractions that come hand-in-hand with verbal communication. Funny books do a particularly good job of teaching children about those subtle underlying language rules, and I love watching my daughter realize on her own that, even though a character is seemingly saying one thing, you can infer through the context of the illustrations and the intonation of how the line might be read that the character actually MEANS something completely different. And, if you’re looking for an example of that kind of book, you can hardly do better than I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen.

Named as one of the New York Times best illustrated children’s books of 2011, I Want My Hat Back is a masterpiece of understated, slow-burn humor. Even Klassen’s illustrations revel in the art of the deadpan, giving us a menagerie of animal characters with stony, nearly unchanging faces. And yet the blank expressions of the animals – especially the face of the lead character, a bear – can suddenly convey volumes of emotion with only a slight shift of posture or eye position. Fun with language aside, this is a beautiful book – Klassen’s illustrative style reminds me of an exquisite hybrid of Frederick‘s Leo Leonni and A Sick Day for Amos McGee‘s Erin Stead.

I Want My Hat Back

Seriously, Mr Fox. If you're holding out on me...

And it’s a heck of a lot of fun to read too. The premise of I Want a Hat Back is gorgeously understated – there’s a bear who’s lost his hat and he wants it back. But, out of that set-up, Klassen creates an extremely funny scenario. Realizing that his hat is gone, the bear starts to ask other animals in the forest if they’ve seen his hat. He asks a fox and a frog, and they offer polite, repetitious responses, informing him that, “No. I have not seen any hats around here.” The bear then encounters a rabbit, who’s wearing a bright red pointy hat, the color of which starkly stands out against the muted earth-tone palette of all the other illustrations in the book. When asked about the hat, the rabbit responds:

No. Why are you asking me.
I haven’t seen it.
I haven’t seen any hats anywhere.
I would not steal a hat.
Don’t ask me any more questions.

And, no matter how obvious it is that he’s lying – talk about a self-incriminating witness – the bear doesn’t pick up on it, says “Thank you anyway”, and moves on to questioning a turtle.

I Want My Hat Back

Awww... poor guy...

As soon as I turned the page after the rabbit’s rambling response, my daughter did a brief double-take and said, “Wait… he totally stole that hat, didn’t he?” I gave a non-committal shrug and replied, “What do you think?”, and, suddenly, my daughter’s engagement with the story exponentially increased. She couldn’t believe that the bear hadn’t picked up on the rabbit’s obvious lie OR that the bear didn’t notice what was probably his own hat sitting on the rabbit’s head. Now my five-year-old had more information than the bear narrator and, enlivened by her discovery, she couldn’t wait to see how the mystery played out. [read the rest of the post…]

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In Praise of Mélanie Watt – Part Three: Leon the Chameleon and You’re Finally Here

by Tom B.

I’ve spent two posts so far lauding the comedic storytelling talents of author-illustrator Mélanie Watt – apologies again for the delay in getting the third part of the trilogy online – and now it’s time for us to take a look at what’s left. And by “what’s left”, I mean, what other Mélanie Watt books I’ve read with my daughter. Let me warn you – my exposure to Watt’s works is achingly incomplete. At the Kids Can Press website, Watt is listed as the creator of 18 different picture books and my family has read about 8 of them. Granted, we have read most of Watt’s two most acclaimed and widely-known series, Scaredy Squirrel and Chester, so we’ve covered most of the big hits, but there are still a lot of deeper album tracks that we still haven’t explored yet. (We particularly want to check out her Learning with Animals series and the picture book Augustine.)

Leon the Chameleon

Leon the Chameleon: Watt's first picture book

However, we have read two of those “and the rest” titles – Leon the Chameleon and You’re Finally Here – and, let’s get this out of the way up-front, both are really strong titles that you definitely should pick up at your local library, if you can. You’re Finally Here is definitely the better of the two books, but there’s a reason for that. And that reason is… there’s a ten-year gap between the publication of Leon and You’re Finally Here. Leon the Chameleon was the first picture book that Watt ever published – she originally created it as part of a design class assignment at the University of Quebec – and You’re Finally Here was published in early 2011. So, Leon was the product of an up-and-coming artist experimenting with the picture book format for the first time and You’re Finally Here is that same artist checking back in with almost a decade of publishing experience under her belt.

Can you tell the difference between the two books? In a word, yes. Leon is a fun book, but it’s very straightforward, very predictable. Now, predictable isn’t always bad. Listening to someone sing “Danny Boy” is predictable – you know how the song goes – but that doesn’t stop you from tearing up when someone really, really talented sings the heck of the song and brings down the house. Leon the Chameleon doesn’t bring down the house, but it’s earnest and fun and shows a TON of promise. [read the rest of the post…]

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