Julie Danielson

In this irresistible story, readers fall for Clement the rabbit, Jean the elephant and Alan Alexander the bear, the three tiny friends of a girl named Maggie.

“The sun set, the moon rose,” and Maggie helps Clement get ready for bed. Then, surprise: It’s a pajama party when Jean and Alan show up in PJs. (Alan’s are a bit too big, and in one very funny spread, when the three creatures leap for joy on Maggie’s bed, Alan’s pajama bottoms don’t leap with him.)

Who wants to slip under the covers when there are chicken dances to do, funny faces to make, hide-and-seek to play, balloons to bounce, yoga to practice, snacks to eat and wishes to be made upon shooting stars? The joy and heart of dearing play of these three friends. (Maggie often seems to be on the sidelines, as if she’s the parental presence.) Either the girl’s imaginative revelry with her stuffed animals is a potent thing, or she lives in a world where pajama-clad, pint-sized creatures visit to play with her each night. No matter. The play’s the thing.

Nearly everything about Thank You and Good Night is comfy and intimate, including its smaller size. The soft color palette is especially inviting; the humor is sweetly goofy; and the compositions are uncluttered. Look closely at the window where the three creatures play with balloons: It seems to be a tribute to the ultimate bedtime book, Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon, as it looks almost precisely like the window in the iconic great green room. There are other nods to beloved children’s books throughout this story. (Could Maggie even be a tribute to Brown herself?) The snug ending, an ode to gratitude and the joy of children, is perfection.

Call it a night with this one, the year’s most captivating bedtime book.

Julie Danielson features authors and illustrators at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a children’s literature blog.

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“There were five of them. And they were waiting.” Thus opens Kevin Henkes’ latest picture book, featuring an unseen’s child five patient toys, all of whom sit in a windowsill and watch the world go by. There’s an owl, waiting for the moon; a pig with an umbrella, waiting for some rain; a bear with a kite, waiting for wind; a puppy on a sled, who longs for some snow; and a content rabbit who “wasn’t waiting for anything in particular. He just liked to look out the window and wait.” 

Everything about this book’s appearance is soft. Henkes uses a pastel-dominated palette, delicate pinks and blues and greens, on uncluttered spreads laid out on cream-colored paper. Curved, rounded lines are the name of the game, hinting at the security and comfort young children crave. Despite this softness, there’s loss and tragedy—a new addition to the windowsill, a china elephant “from far away,” falls and breaks. And there are scary moments, as when lightning cracks in the sky, and observant readers see that Henkes varies the expressions on the toys’ mostly unchanging faces: The owl squints in fear, and the pig’s eyes are wide and round.

The world beyond the window is their stage, and the wordless spreads really shine. One features frosted panes; another has fireworks; and yet another reveals a rainbow. The five toys watch in wonder, “but mostly they waited.” Children undoubtedly spend a lot of time waiting, since they’re often at the whim of the adults in their lives. But despite their dreaming and waiting, life tends to be full of surprises, and it is for the toys, too. One day, a cat with patches shows up and joins the gang. The cat has a secret, one that will delight young children.

Good things come to those who wait, as they say. And this child-friendly tale of wonder and anticipation is a very good thing.

Julie Danielson features authors and illustrators at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a children’s literature blog.

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

On the third spread of this story of a hurrying parent with a curious child, readers see a street scene with a “one way” sign in the background. It’s fitting for this horizontally oriented book of a mother rushing to get someplace on time. “Hurry!” she keeps telling her son, dashing to the next page. But “wait,” he says. There’s a big and endlessly intriguing world to see, and he wants to slow down and take it all in.

There are several surprises from Antoinette Portis in this story about the unexpected joys of the world. For one, don’t rush past the title page spread. The boy stands next to the book’s title in warm, orange letters: Wait. And he stares at the letter “t,” because—look closely now—perched on it is a ladybug. His mother walks off the spread, tugging him along. She has, we already know before the story begins, somewhere to be. And fast.

Portis takes advantage of every available opportunity to tell this quiet, poignant tale. Even the book’s front and back cover cleverly convey the heart of the story, as we see a relaxed family of cats going one way (following the aforementioned ladybug, no less), while the boy—so eager to stop and pet them—is dragged along by his mother, stage left. Readers are invited to read slowly and carefully, just as the boy would have it: Look carefully, because what looks like a blossom on a bush is actually, as seen on the next spread, a butterfly, just waiting to be seen and appreciated.

Using pencil, charcoal and ink with digitally colored spreads and thick outlines, Portis showcases a primarily cool palette that gives way to a vivid, colorful rainbow that the boy insists his mother stop to see. She gives in, mercifully, even forgetting the subway car she had been so diligently heading toward.

This is a story to be savored.

Julie Danielson features authors and illustrators at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a children’s literature blog.

Nearly every person, no matter what age, has experienced the sting of knowing a friend said something behind her back. And all of us know what it’s like to misunderstand something and let a situation get out of hand. This is the drama at the heart of Liz Rosenberg’s What James Said, where one elementary-age girl tells readers how she refuses to talk to her friend James. “We are in a fight,” she declares. Word has gotten around, you see, that James said that he thinks our narrator thinks she is perfect.

This is hurtful to the girl, and she lays out the reasons she is, in fact, not perfect. Her hair is plain brown, and she’s not very good at spelling—to name but two things. She’s good at art, however, and one of her pieces has been chosen as “Best of Show” in art class at school. And while she does her best to ignore James all throughout the story, readers will notice his confusion and his stubborn attempts to convince her to talk to him. “Are you feeling okay?” he eventually asks her. When the misunderstanding is revealed—he thinks her art piece is “perfect,” and the girls’ friends clearly misunderstood James and started an impressive game of Gossip—readers breathe a sigh of relief.

Rosenberg’s elegant text channels the way children this age think and feel, and Matt Myers’ uncluttered artwork, in clever ways, lets the girl and James have all the focus. When other children are part of a spread, Myers often outlines only their bodies in muted and thickly lined watercolors. And for several highly emotional scenes, he covers the moment with watercolor splashes: When the girl hears the unfounded gossip, her hands cover her eyes and she’s covered in pink splashes of watercolor paints. Myers’ use of these paint splashes to communicate the strong emotions of the story really works.

It’s an honest exploration of best-friend dynamics. Spread the word: This one is not to be missed.

Julie Danielson features authors and illustrators at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a children’s literature blog.

It takes a village, as they say, and in this case it takes one to help a young girl feel right at home.

A girl moves from the country to the city, where “instead of birds and crickets, she heard horns and trains.” Her new home may be “plain and gray,” like all the houses around her, but it happens to be next to a park, the same park of the book’s title. The girl misses the butterflies most about her home in the country, but when she enters the park to seek butterflies, none are there, despite the plate of cookies she’s brought to make a good first impression.  

She enlists the help of newfound friends, who snag some butterflies—but they all fly away. One, however, leads them all downtown, where doors are opened and curious townsfolk step out to join the butterfly search. After the girl sees flowers on her neighborhood romp, she is inspired to take flowers to the abandoned park. Once again, she fails to spot butterflies, but when her neighbors show up with flowers for planting, she realizes she’s finally at home. She’s found that she lives in a community of people who care about her, as well as about making their own town a place where things grow and thrive. They plant until the park is “brimming with flowers and laughter.”

Elly MacKay constructs this story with delicate cut-paper illustrations, sets of photographed dioramas that glow with light. The settings are intricate—the Butterfly Park entrance gate is a thing of beauty—and MacKay’s sense of composition is spot-on. Many moments in the story spread across two pages, and she avoids any of her paper pieces getting lost in the book’s gutter. The final spread is a gatefold, which opens up to reveal the new-and-improved park, filled with just the creatures the girl longs to see: Colorful butterflies fill the space, but best of all, it’s filled with the warmth of a community that cares.

Julie Danielson features authors and illustrators at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a children’s literature blog.

Miss Hazeltine is a generous soul—and a cat lover. She’d have to be, since she’s opened her Home for Shy and Fearful Cats. Not sure at first if anyone will bring their felines, she’s surprised to find her house filled with them—ones that are scared of mice and birds, refuse to purr and can’t even pounce. Never fear: Miss Hazeltine is here to work her magic.

But it’s not actually magic she wields. Instead, it’s good old-fashioned patience and kindness: “Miss Hazeltine didn’t mind,” author Alicia Potter writes, “if some cats only watched. She let them be.” One of those cats is Crumb, who likes to hide under Miss Hazeltine’s bed. She gives Crumb some extra attention, and he only hopes one day he can muster up enough courage to thank her for her words of advice.

He gets his chance when Miss Hazeltine heads out one night to replenish the milk bucket and falls in a ditch. Worse yet, she’s fallen where there are owls, mushrooms and darkness, the three things that make her own daring dwindle. The spread where Crumb works up his courage to head out into the moonlight is an utter delight, as illustrator Birgitta Sif reveals his transformation with the smart use of line and shadow, not to mention copious white space so that Crumb gets all the attention he deserves. Sif, it must be noted, seems to be the go-to illustrator for books with shy protagonists. Many of her previous books have been about similar subjects, and she delicately captures the vulnerabilities of such characters.

Sif gives the many cat characters lots of personality, and she brings warmth to Miss Hazeltine’s comfy, ramshackle home. The book is filled with fun details: Look closely in one spread, and you’ll find Crumb hiding securely under a living room rug. In the end, where all of Potter’s story threads come together without a detail left out, Miss Hazeltine rests assured that her cat tenants did, indeed, learn to be “bold as lions.”

This is a sweet and winning story about courage found.

Julie Danielson features authors and illustrators at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a children’s literature blog.

Fans of the award-winning Open This Little Book will be drawn to the exuberant Inside This Book by author-illustrator Barney Saltzberg. It’s a testament to the robust imagination of children, as well as the very notion of self-publishing.

A boy named Seymour has written a story that is printed on smaller pages within the book that readers hold in their hands. Seymour’s story is all about how his mother created for him and his siblings some books with blank pages. Seymour watches the world around him and fills his book with stories and observations. Next up, printed on even smaller pages, is his sister Fiona’s story. Dominated by purples, it is filled with art and poetry, her two favorite things. She also shares a poem she’s written about her dog before she runs out of room. Finally, their youngest sibling, Wilbur, shares his book on even smaller paper. It’s illustrated in what appears to be crayon, and the sentences are simple: “This is me. This is my family.”

There’s a lot of joy and humor here, and Wilbur gets the biggest laugh with his “This is a dinosaur and my family!” spread, showing a hungry dinosaur chasing the family. Saltzberg uses bold and colorful fonts, and each story reflects the personality and age level of its author in very entertaining ways.

Seymour wraps things up by showing how the family decided to put all their stories together into . . . well, Saltzberg’s book. “Because books are better when they are shared.” And this remarkably child-centered book is one you’ll definitely want to share.

This article was originally published in the April 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.