In When You Can Swim, readers explore the joys of swimming in various bodies of water—oceans, ponds, lakes, rivers and more—in a text set primarily in conditional statements (the “when you can swim” of the title), as spoken by a parent to a child. This phrase is a refrain that conveys the abundant possibilities and delights of moving in the water: the “clinking / of waves passing in and out / of a million pebbles,” the ripples on a pond, the whitecaps on a river, “the smoke on the lake” and much more.
In Jack Wong’s breathtaking watery landscapes, strong currents surge beneath “rushing waterfalls,” and sunlight shimmers on ocean waves and the surface of a river. Text and illustrations merge seamlessly to illuminate the ways in which swimming animates all the senses, and Wong writes with beguiling lyricism and figurative language: “When you can swim, / you’ll reach landscapes as foreign as the moon / no spaceship required / except the craters are squishy and filled with reeds / ready to swallow loose sandals / but like good explorers, we’ll leave only footprints.”
Wong’s playful perspectives are captivating. In one spread, from the perspective of lying on our backs in the water, we see “treetops drift by” and a dragonfly buzz near. In another, we turn the book for a stunning vertically oriented image of two girls who dive down after breaking the surface of a lake. A rich apricot-colored light adorns the top of the spread with darkness below, and Wong describes “tannin-soaked lakes / pitch dark from tree bark / like oversteeped tea.” The book’s ending features the same child in the book’s opening, ready to take swimming lessons at a public pool.
An appended note from Wong, striking in its tenderness, explains his hesitancy as “an immigrant kid” in Canada to swim at public pools and his desire to tell a story with “differently colored characters” because “representation is power”—a point he makes incisively and beautifully in this splendid picture book.
The text and illustrations of When You Can Swim merge seamlessly to illuminate the ways in which swimming animates all one’s senses.
Bestselling picture book author Jon Klassen (I Want My Hat Back, This Is Not My Hat, We Found a Hat) takes a traditional Tyrolean story and makes it his own in The Skull, a five-part folk-tale retelling that is both spine-chilling and touching.
A girl named Otilla leaves home and runs through the forest at night. Bewildered, she trips and falls in the snow and hears someone calling her name. After a short cry, she finds her courage, gets up and keeps running until she spots a house whose only occupant is a skull. The skull agrees to let Otilla rest there. She explores the home, which includes a dungeon with a bottomless pit; gets to know the skull, whom she carries around; and learns she’s the first person in a long time to find the house. The two even don traditional Tyrolean carved masks and dance in the ballroom. The skull then reveals to Otilla that a headless skeleton visits the home nightly, chasing the skull. That night, Otilla takes matters into her own hands in order to defeat the skeleton and help her new friend.
In a closing author’s note, Klassen describes how he first read the folk tale that The Skull is based on at a library in Alaska and how, after a year had passed, he’d forgotten some of its basic plot points. His brain, he writes, had rewritten the tale, and he liked that version better. He adds, “[Folk tales] are supposed to be changed by who is telling them, and you never find them the same way twice.” Thank goodness for the story that came from Klassen’s singular imagination. It is funny (pretty much any time the skull eats), mysterious (why did Otilla run away from home?), eerie (“GIVE ME THAT SKULL,” the skeleton shouts), tender (Otilla’s determination to bravely help her new friend) and macabre (Otilla’s impressive skills with rolling pins and fire) all at once. Klassen brings much beauty—the rays of sunlight on the ballroom floor, the shadows thrown by warm candlelight in dark rooms, and the pair’s breakfast in the garden room—to this genuinely (and delightfully) weird tale.
Bestselling picture book author Jon Klassen brings much beauty to this genuinely (and delightfully) weird tale.
Rubin lives in a tiny town next to a large forest, and at school, he likes to listen to the orchestra, including his sister and her cello. He leans through an open window, resting his arms and head on the sill, listening reverently and wishing he could join. Rubin is thrilled when the maestro hands him a violin and suggests he learn to play. Although Rubin can only produce screeches, the maestro assures him that he’ll soon play at a concert.
Eventually, Rubin heads into the forest to practice, where a crowd of cats gathers around him to hear him play. Zhang writes with verve about the cats and their impassioned singing: “Miiaaoooo,” goes the feline crowd in a “thicket of cacophonous sound,” their howls “a leaping crescendo.”
When at last Rubin performs with the school orchestra at their concert, the pace quickens and the mischief ramps up as a group of waltzing cats appears. Delightful depictions of cats crowd the pages—sometimes nearly every inch—with their leaping, dancing and singing, and soon everyone gets “caught in the whirlwind of Rubin’s sound, flying.”
Ezra Jack Keats Award winner Gracey Zhang (Lala’s Words) fills the illustrations of When Rubin Plays with vivid colors: plenty of scarlets, blues and greens, as well as backgrounds of vibrant yellow and orange. There is an infectious energy to Zhang’s loose lines, particularly the hand-lettered “eeeeiiii” sounds of Rubin’s violin.
Zhang states in her author’s note that she was inspired to set her story in Santa Ana de Velasco, Bolivia, after learning about the rich tradition of baroque classical music in the Chiquitos Province and its former mission towns. As a tale about the joys of creating music, When Rubin Plays lands a triumphant ending.
Gracey Zhang fills the illustrations of When Rubin Plays with vivid colors and an infectious energy that crescendos throughout a triumphant tale about the joys of creating music.
Move over Prince Charming, for Cinderella and a Mouse Called Fred (Anne Schwartz, $18.99, 9780593480038). Deborah Hopkinson (a frequent contributor to BookPage) and Paul O. Zelinsky’s queer retelling of the age-old Cinderella tale centers on a tiny gray mouse living in a pumpkin patch. The kind Cinderella (or “Ella,” as her friends call her) gives him his name, Fred. A grumpy fairy godmother turns Fred into a horse so that Ella can go to the big ball. The prince, however, is a brat, and Ella heads home at midnight—but not until she grabs some seeds from the pumpkin that had been her carriage. Later, she watches as the prince tries to fit her glass slipper onto her stepsisters’ feet. “I’ll find my own destiny, thank you very much,” Ella says to Fred.
The following spring, Ella plants the pumpkin seeds, and one grows to a splendid size. At the fair, she wins a blue ribbon and meets her future wife: another young farmer “who fell madly in love with Ella, just as she was.”
Zelinsky combines bustling, full-bleed spreads with an eye-catching palette marked by various shades of pink and—naturally—the deep orange of pumpkins. The masterfully composed spread in which Fred transforms into a horse at the tip of the fairy godmother’s magic wand is especially striking. And Hopkinson’s characters sparkle on the page: The fairy godmother is a hoot, Fred is charming and Ella possesses a refreshing amount of spunk. The text is funny (“Seriously?” says Ella, “Glass high heels?”), and the abundant dialogue flows seamlessly, making this spirited and romantic retelling a great choice for storytimes and classroom reader’s theater activities.
Deborah Hopkinson and Paul O. Zelinsky’s queer retelling of the age-old Cinderella tale possesses a refreshing amount of spunk.
As The Winter Bird opens, author Kate Banks cleverly invites young readers to put their inference skills to work as she describes the change in seasons. “It was the time of year when the sun went to bed early,” she writes. “The big brown bear lumbered off to its winter den. . . . And the birds prepared to fly south.” But a nightingale, a spring bird, remains stranded on the ground by a broken wing. “What will happen to me?” it sings.
A nearby barn owl tells the nightingale that it will have to stay behind and learn the ways of winter. Over the months that follow, the nightingale sees snow for the first time, a rabbit invites the bird to take shelter in its burrow, and squirrels share their food with the bird. Eventually, the nightingale learns how to keep warm on its own and to forage for its own food. It even survives a blizzard with the other creatures, breaking the storm’s “eerie hush” with a song of “summer’s sweetness” and then an ode to “winter’s wonders.”
Banks’ satisfying prose is evocative and filled with figurative language. Cold creeps “in on icy feet,” and the blizzard covers “the world in a shimmering blanket.” Meanwhile, in full-bleed spreads, illustrator Suzie Mason effectively brings winter to the page. Her color palette grows increasingly dark as the season sets in and the animals retreat. In two spreads, she places readers behind the rabbit and nightingale in the rabbit’s burrow, looking out at the falling snow along with the wide-eyed creatures. As spring arrives, Mason punctuates snowy spreads with vivid greens, and by the final spread, green sings from every inch of the pages.
The Winter Bird is an earnest anthropomorphized tale. Its creatures support and encourage one another, forming a kind and tightknit community that transforms the nightingale. As Banks reflects, “It was a spring bird, but it had become a winter bird, too.”
When a nightingale with a broken wing can’t fly south for the winter, a kind and tightknit community of creatures help it survive the season in this earnest tale.
In So Much Snow, author Kristen Schroeder and illustrator Sarah Jacoby take readers through the days of the week by exploring the joys of a big winter snowfall in the woods.
“On Monday, it starts to snow,” the book opens as a tiny mouse watches huge three snowflakes fall to the grass. “How high will it go?” More snow falls on Tuesday, and a rabbit pops up from behind a log to delight in the promise of winter weather. Once again, the text asks: “How high will it go?” Schroeder repeats this phrase throughout the book as the snow continues to fall all the way up until Sunday. “The end of the snow. Brilliant blanketing. SO MUCH SNOW!”
Writing with an elegant economy, Schroeder fills the book with punchy, alliterative sentences starring vivid active verbs. Flakes float, hilltops hide, drifts dance and more. Jacoby depicts foxes, wolves and deer in motion—leaping, jumping and sniffing the air as the color palette becomes progressively whiter. By the book’s climax, amid snow drifts and high winds, Jacoby’s compositions become wonders of line and movement.
In the book’s second half, as readers pause to appreciate the stillness of wintry days, it’s a new week and the animals reappear: “On Monday, the sun starts to show.” Schroeder’s text encourages readers to notice shrinking shapes and thawing things, and to greet the creatures (“Look, it’s Moose. Hello!”).” Rabbit even waves directly at readers while venturing out in the melting snow. By Saturday, it’s “snow’s new low.” Spring seems to have arrived. “NO MORE SNOW!”
This cozy winter adventure closes with a delightful twist that’s true to its title. So Much Snow is so much joy.
Readers will wonder just how high the snow will go in this joyful celebration of a big winter snowfall that closes with a delightful twist.
You only think you know the story of the three billy goats who wanted to cross the bridge and the troll who tried to stop them. In The Three Billy Goats Gruff, acclaimed author Mac Barnett and Caldecott Medalist Jon Klassen create a wickedly funny retelling that breathes new life into the classic story. The author and illustrator chatted with BookPage about transforming oral tales into picture books, their many years of collaboration and the interior decorating habits of trolls.
This is your seventh picture book together. Typically, picture book authors and illustrators don’t work directly with each other. What are your collaborations like? Has the process changed? Author Mac Barnett: Jon and I have been friends for 13 years now, and we still talk about picture books more than anything else. Like, it’s not even close. When we’re making a book together, it feels like an opportunity to continue that conversation, and in that way our books are documents of friendship and expressions of our mutual love for this art form.
Illustrator Jon Klassen: I don’t know if it’s changed much in terms of how we talk. We’ve always had this kind of creepy shorthand where we start sentences and the rest is understood.
Our collaboration does change a fair bit from book to book because we mix up how they come about pretty often. Sometimes we beat out a story together, then Mac writes it and then I draw it, and I go back to him for changes in the text to solve problems we hadn’t thought of initially. For this one, he’d written the text without me specifically in mind, so it was much more about treating the text as almost unchangeable. I think maybe there were one or two tweaks, but it wasn’t as much of a hands-on collaboration. But that’s very enjoyable too. I like constraints, and that’s a big one.
This is the first volume in what will be at least a trilogy of picture books that retell fairy tales. Why did you begin with “The Three Billy Goats Gruff”? Barnett: Foremost on my mind was ensuring that the stories work as picture books. I wanted to create entertaining read-alouds that make good use of page turns and set up dynamic relationships between text and image.
It was a delicate but significant act of adaptation: Fairy tales began as an oral tradition and then were set down as straight prose (sometimes with decorative illustrations, which function way differently from the images in a picture book). Fairy tales are such crowd pleasers. Over countless retellings, these stories evolved to maximize reactions from groups of children sitting and listening.
“I hope the adults who read this book to kids feel plugged into a centurieslong tradition of getting big laughs, huge groans and all sorts of yelps, squeals and ewws.”
Picture books work differently than any other form of storytelling. And “The Three Billy Goats Gruff” just made so much sense as a picture book—it’s such a visual story, and all about scale. I hope the adults who read this book to kids feel plugged into a centurieslong tradition of getting big laughs, huge groans and all sorts of yelps, squeals and ewws.
Klassen: This story is a tricky one to tell because a lot of times it’s included in some kind of anthology and it only gets one page and one illustration or something. But Mac understood that the pleasure in the story is in the page-turn reveals, and in drawing it all out and then doubling down over and over again when it gets to the part where the troll gets punished. The pacing of it is perfectly suited to a picture book, and Mac divided it up that way and got maximum impact out of the beats. It was a real pleasure to work over.
Mac, what well-known elements of the story did you want to preserve? Which ones did you want to play around with? Barnett: In this story, I leave the original plot pretty much intact. I love revisionist storytelling and fractured fairy tales (The Stinky Cheese Man made me want to write picture books), but that’s not really what we’re up to here. This book feels more like how Jon and I would tell this story about a troll and some goats that we remember hearing as kids. That said, every telling of a fairy tale is a retelling, and I think this version feels very much our own.
In “The Three Billy Goats Gruff,” the good guys don’t get much stage time. The goats file by, one by one, but we spend most of our time with the villain. So I wanted to give a little more sense of who this troll was and what he wanted, and I probably inevitably ended up sympathizing with him a bit.
I changed the ending too. Here’s the original text, as set down in the middle of the 19th century (translated from the Norwegian by D.L. Ashliman): “And then he flew at the troll, and poked his eyes out with his horns, and crushed him to bits, body and bones, and tossed him out into the cascade.”
For me, that doesn’t work in a picture book. It’s too violent. Mind you, I’d have no problem telling the story that way—out loud, without pictures—to a group of young kids. It works great without pictures! You can feel the storyteller stoking the crowd, getting squeals and screams, upping the ante. But as soon as you add pictures, it gets too gross. It breaks the spell. A famous Jon Klassen eyeball flying from its socket, a little optic nerve wiggling behind it? No thank you. We wanted to preserve the spirit of the ending—gratuitous, escalating, funny—and I like where we landed very much.
“Jon and I like to see what’s on the other side of a running gag. What do you find when you exhaust the joke, but still keep telling the story?”
Jon, as you set out to illustrate this book, what scene were you most excited to bring to life? Klassen: I really liked the beginning spread, where we first meet the troll. The illustration only takes up like a fifth of the page space and you barely see him. Book illustrations, for me, aren’t about single spreads and how great they can be; they are about consecutive storytelling and setting something up and hopefully paying it off. Even though, on its own, that first spread doesn’t show very much, it’s got a lot of tension and promise, and I like that a lot.
What was challenging about illustrating the goats and the troll? What was enjoyable? Klassen: The goats were very fun because they are the straight men in this story. Their job is to play it cool and look at the troll like he’s ridiculous. From the start they’ve got a solid, coordinated plan to deal with him, and they’re never scared, so they get to be almost like statues of goats that move on- and offstage when the story tells them to, and that’s about it.
The troll took a minute to figure out. My first few stabs were a little too human. The main thing I wanted to keep about him was my impression, from illustrations of trolls when I was growing up, that they almost look like they’re part of the ground they inhabit. It’s not as much about the details or a specific anatomy as it is about them almost being hidden, and then you see their eyes in there somewhere.
Mac, the troll speaks mostly in rhyme, a technique you haven’t often employed. How did you arrive at this? Barnett: I love poetry and poetic forms. I studied poetry and for a long time, well into college, I thought I might become a poet. Fairy tales often move from poetry to prose, so I thought it’d be fun to do that here. Jon’s staging of this story is very theatrical, and I think the troll’s poetry feels similarly performative: He’s chewing the scenery and really inhabiting his trollness . . . until it all breaks down.
We spend most of the book in one location: the bridge beneath which the troll lives. Jon, how did you decide what this would look like? Klassen: When I first took on the book, I bought an old book on bridge design. I was all excited about doing it in this historical way, but then the more I sat with the story, the more it seemed like the right answer was actually a very, very simple bridge that was probably made by hand and maybe wasn’t even used by people anymore. The troll had claimed it long ago, and he’s not much on upkeep. Like the troll, the planks of the bridge almost merge with the ground, and they’ve got grass and vines growing on them. I wanted the wood to feel soft.
“Book illustrations, for me, aren’t about single spreads and how great they can be; they are about consecutive storytelling and setting something up and hopefully paying it off.”
The troll’s decor started with the skull hanging from the bridge, and then I added some bones around him. The team at Scholastic liked this direction and kept embellishing on what else he’d have down there, so now we have some playing cards and a boot and an old can—just stuff that might’ve floated downriver at some point. I think there’s a lot of downtime under there between potential meals crossing the bridge.
What are your favorite illustrations in the book? Klassen: My favorite is the page where all three goats are eating in the meadow near the end. They look safe and satisfied, and it’s just a really strong moment. The story is mainly about justice against this antagonistic force, which is simple enough, but the result ended up hitting me harder than I expected it to. I think it’s one of the better spreads Mac and I have done together in any of our books.
Barnett: He texted [that spread] to me as soon as he’d finished it, which he only does when he’s really excited about something, and it totally knocked me over.
One thing we do in this book is make the third goat ridiculously large. Most of the time, the progression of goats in this story goes small, medium, large. Sometimes you get an extra-large goat at the end. But we go small, medium, enormous—absolutely gargantuan, bigger than any goat in the history of picture books. We thought it would be funny.
Our version, like the original tale, ends with all the goats together, eating on the grassy ridge. And this picture is of three goats, one of whom is just ridiculously huge, enjoying a nice meal at sunset, completely at peace. And while the visual joke is still present, the image is so sweet and peaceful and moving. I cried when I saw it.
In a lot of our books together, Jon and I like to see what’s on the other side of a running gag. What do you find when you exhaust the joke, but still keep telling the story? The answer, often, is the sublime.
This book contains a litany of ways in which the troll dreams of preparing and eating goat. If you were a troll, what would be your favorite way to eat goat? Klassen: I don’t think it’s a secret that neither Mac or I give too much thought to the overt lessons our books might teach, but if there is a lesson in here anywhere, it’s that we should probably lay off the goat-eating.
If you encountered a troll beneath a bridge you needed to cross, what would you do? Klassen: I’d probably deliberate on the edge for a little while, then suddenly make a run for it across the bridge, be caught three steps in and eaten immediately.
Barnett: I’d try to sneak across while the troll is eating Jon.
Mac Barnett and Caldecott Medalist Jon Klassen take on the classic Norwegian fairy tale of comeuppance in The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Their rendition spends a notable amount of time with the tale’s villain, a remarkably creepy troll with spindly legs and pointy, fanglike teeth that protrude from his lower jaw. A skull dangles from the bridge that serves as his shelter, and he holds a fork and spoon, ready to dine.
Barnett renders much of the troll’s dialogue in rhyme, particularly when the creature describes his appetite: “I am a troll. I live to eat. / I love the sound of hooves and feet / and paws and claws on cobblestones. / For that’s the sound of meat and bones!” Young readers will delight in the antagonist’s grossness, like when he uses a dirty fingernail to scrape a ball of hairy wax from his ears, because all he’s had to eat recently is “a leather boot and some goop he’d found in his belly button.”
This troll might be creepy, but he’s also devilishly funny. He compliments himself on outwitting the smallest goat, who has promised that his brothers are coming: “I’m so smart! And fun and handsome.” When he meets the largest of the three brothers, who is so tall that at first readers see only his furry shins, the troll is awestruck. In the wordless spread that follows, Klassen plays effectively with scale, depicting this final goat head-butting the troll, who flies off the verso, his fork trailing through the air behind him.
The troll’s punishment involves a hilarious waterfall descent, but to say more would spoil the surprise. Until that point, the entire story unfolds at the bridge. A less-skilled illustrator might have hurt the story’s pace, but Klassen consistently adds visual interest through design choices, framing and details in the setting, such as the items scattered around the troll’s abode.
This wickedly funny take will leave children clamoring for more. Fortunately, it’s the first in a planned series in which Barnett will retell classic fairy tales. If the volumes that follow are this stellar, readers are in good hands.
Guided by Dadaism, an art movement that sought to reject logic, author Jon Scieszka and illustrator Julia Rothman turn traditional nursery rhymes on their heads in the playful, subversive The Real Dada Mother Goose.
Nonsense and absurdity take center stage as Scieszka and Rothman spin and twist six evergreen verses inside out and upside down. Each verse is transformed into multiple new versions; some change structure and even switch mediums entirely. Among the renditions of “Humpty Dumpty” are a “boring” version, in which the famous royal horses and horsemen don’t “really have / do to anything,” a censored version with key words concealed by blue rectangles and a version translated into a series of foreign languages. “Jack Be Nimble” is presented in both secret codes and Esperanto, a well-known constructed language, while “Hickory Dickory Dock” is written partially in Egyptian hieroglyphs. “Hey Diddle Diddle” becomes a haiku, and “Twinkle Twinkle” is transformed into a rebus picture puzzle.
The ideal readers for this 80-page picture book will be elementary school children who are past nursery rhymes and consider themselves world-weary enough to want to poke fun at their toddler years. If those children also like solving puzzles, even better: The book’s abundant, inviting backmatter provides definitions for and explanations of how to work with the many devices employed in the book, such as anagrams, Spoonerisms (“Nack be jimble. / Quack be jick.”), the NATO phonetic alphabet and more.
The book is dedicated to Blanche Fisher Wright, who illustrated the popular The Real Mother Goose in 1916 and whose art is reproduced throughout these pages. A biographical note about her as well as a bibliography of her titles is included in the backmatter. Rothman inserts her own impish, comical drawings around reproductions of Wright’s work, such as in the “Jabberwocky” version of “Old Mother Hubbard,” where the title character appears with three heads. Rothman also populates the pages with “Dada Geese,” who serve as guides through this madcap adventure.
The Real Dada Mother Goose is a thoroughly entertaining book enhanced by detailed and plentiful backmatter. This handbook for creative mischief is sure to inspire many hours of Dadaist delight.
Nonsense and absurdity take center stage as Jon Scieszka and Julia Rothman turn six evergreen Mother Goose verses upside down and inside out.
“Over a hill, at the end of a road, by a glittering stream that twists and turns, stands a house,” begins two-time Caldecott Medalist Sophie Blackall’s deft, sophisticated Farmhouse.
A couple raises 12 children in the house, and Blackall captures the details of their everyday lives. We see marks on the wall to note the growing children’s heights; the “serious room” where the family gathers for important discussions; the attic bedroom where the children sleep and dream under its sloping ceiling; the farmhouse where they milk the cows “no matter the weather”; and much more.
Despite all this bustling activity, full of the stuff of life itself, Blackall’s text is written in the past tense; she’s commemorating a home that once was, but is no more. She devotes one brief spread to the children’s adult lives, describing what they did after leaving the farmhouse. Once the last grown child leaves, the house falls into utter disarray. A bear even makes its home in the basement!
Soon, Blackall herself enters the book and relates how she found the house and filled her arms with as much as she could carry away. Wallpaper, clothing, books and newspapers, handkerchiefs and more—all from the house itself—were incorporated into the artwork for “this book that you hold” so that the house and everyone in it will “live on . . . like your stories will, so long as they’re told.”
In a lengthy author’s note, accompanied by photographs, Blackall explains that she purchased a farm in upstate New York that included the house that inspired the book. Farmhouse is an openhearted ode to that house, with 48 spectacular pages that absolutely beg to be read aloud. Blackall’s spreads are remarkably textured and detailed. They brim with life and hum with magic, yet skillfully avoid being too crowded or hard to follow.
Vividly realized, Farmhouse is filled with a tenderness and a longing that aches as you confront its bittersweet memories. Yet it leaves you with gratitude that an artist like Blackall, with the observational prowess of a poet, stumbled upon it and brought it to life again.
Two-time Caldecott Medalist Sophie Blackall offers a sophisticated, openhearted ode to what truly makes a house a home in this tender picture book.
The best picture books tap honestly and unpatronizingly into children’s emotions. These two books remind children that being human means appreciating the complex emotions we all experience.
Sometimes I Grumblesquinch
“I’m a really nice kid,” declares protagonist Katie Honors on the first page of author Rachel Vail and illustrator Hyewon Yum’s Sometimes I Grumblesquinch, a tale about the pitfalls of trying to tame emotions. Katie tries to be on her best behavior at all times. She’s “a good sport” when she loses a soccer match: “‘Good game,’ I say. . . . I hardly frown.” Katie’s mom declares that her daughter is “such a pleasure,” and Katie takes pride in knowing that her parents are proud of her. But readers, privy to Katie’s inner thoughts, know that she contains multitudes.
Katie’s little brother, Chuck, annoys her, and she routinely bottles up how he makes her feel. “Sometimes I grumblesquinch,” Katie confesses. When this happens, her “insides tighten” and she has “mean thoughts,” such as wishing that she had “a trampoline or a tree house or a giraffe instead of a brother.” Vail captures Katie’s feelings with an unequivocal, refreshing candor that’s deeply respectful toward Katie’s complicated interior life: “I wish I could pop [Chuck] like a balloon. . . . I wish he would disappear.” When Katie finally snaps, Yum’s soft color palette and smooth linework are transformed: Intense colors and ragged, angular lines embody Katie’s acute fear that her parents “won’t think I am such a pleasure anymore.”
But Katie’s mother gently validates Katie’s feelings, telling her daughter that she understands how a person can hold both frustration and love for someone. A shocked Katie nods and tells readers, “This nod is true.” These four words convey so much about how children—especially girls—are encouraged to suppress their feelings and minimize their emotions. When Katie acknowledges that her nod is “true,” she’s also suggesting that some of her smiles have been insincere, even forced.
It’s moving to watch Katie begin to understand that attempting to ignore healthy but negative emotions, all in the name of being likable, still causes harm. Even after failing to grumblesquinch all her feelings, Katie still receives a loving hug from her mom, who has space for “the whole me” in her arms.
What Feelings Do When No One’s Looking
Polish author Tina Oziewicz offers readers a whole host of emotions in What Feelings Do When No One’s Looking, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft. (Kudos to Oziewicz’s American publisher, Elsewhere Editions, for placing the translator’s name prominently on the cover.)
Because the book’s title tells readers precisely what to expect, the first spread dives right in, introducing Curiosity, a creature with large ears who sits atop a tall chimney, eager to see what’s beyond the horizon. Curiosity is followed by Joy, Gratitude, Calm, Envy, Insecurities, Shame, Courage, Bliss and more, each depicted on its own spread.
Illustrator Aleksandra Zając (making her picture book debut) introduces an endearing cast of characters, conveying these emotions as furry, amicable creatures who move about on clean, uncluttered backgrounds. Her crisp, fine lines and gray-tone palette (with subtle touches of coral, sky blue and sage) ensure that even the more volatile emotions, such as Anger, won’t frighten the youngest readers.
This is a picture book filled with surprises. There are unexpected personifications (“Jitters sit in a rusty can in a dark corner under a wardrobe.” “Nostalgia sniffs a scarf.”), but Oziewicz also has a startlingly succinct and evocative way of capturing these feelings. “Anxiety juggles,” for one. These two words float amid ample white space next to an unhappy-looking creature atop a unicycle trying to keep five balls in the air, its mouth a thin, wavy line. A full-bleed illustration shows a wide-eyed creature attempting to blend in with patterned floral wallpaper: “Fear pretends it isn’t there.” And what else would Hope do but pack “a sandwich for the road”?
Oziewicz and Zając link two spreads in an especially meaningful way: Readers learn that Hate “chews through links and cables. Can’t connect! Can’t connect!” But in the book’s final spread, Love, who is an electrician, holds an oversize lightbulb aglow with amber hues. The bulb seems to run from the same rose-colored cable Hate tried so vehemently to destroy.
What Feelings Do When No One’s Looking will prompt thoughtful conversations about the wide range of feelings a person can experience. It’s exactly the sort of book that Katie Honors—and all children—need.
These children’s books put some of our most complex emotions into words (and pictures!).
Hakim, a donkey, heads out to visit his friend Daisy, who lives on the top of a mountain, so that he can give her the sweater he knitted. The mountain is covered in a thick fog and said to be riddled with monsters. “You’re doomed!” yells a goat as Hakim begins his journey, establishing a comically eerie tone to the whole affair.
When Hakim sees a strange figure in the fog, he wonders if the old goat was right. From a distance, the outline of the figure is enveloped in mist, and it appears to be a robot-esque monstrosity. But when Hakim and the figure draw closer, the “monster” turns out to be a dog carrying a pallet of bricks on her head. The friendly dog joins Hakim on his journey up the mountain.
Twice more, the fog tricks the travelers into thinking that they see monsters on the path ahead, but each time, they’re proven wrong and a new companion joins the party. Ultimately, the group realizes that “everything looks like a monster in the fog. . . . But the closer you get, the less scary it becomes.”
Understated humor has never been so laugh-out-loud funny as in Ali Bahrampour’s Monsters in the Fog. The moderate absurdity of a dog carrying a pile of bricks on her head is one thing, but the final “monster” tops them all. In the fog, it appears as a massive skull until the page turn reveals the gloriously ridiculous truth: It’s a bear on a tricycle, careening down the mountain on her way to a repair shop to get the brakes fixed. Even better is the way she manages to stop long enough to meet the group: “A rock helped her out,” we read as the tricycle is wedged into a large stone, sending the bear flying through the air.
Bahrampour presents this perfectly paced, playful tale in muted watercolors and a lively cartoon style that’s reminiscent of the work of Jon Agee and William Steig. The reveals steal the show, but readers will also love Hakim’s sweet devotion to Daisy, who is responsible for her own surprising reveal at the book’s close. It may be difficult for a donkey to knit a sweater, but Hakim knows that his struggles with knitting needles and monsters alike are worth it for a friend.
Understated humor has never been so laugh-out-loud funny as in Ali Bahrampour’s perfectly paced, playful picture book.
Yoshi and the Ocean: A Sea Turtle’s Incredible Journey Home, Lindsay Moore’s account of the incredible intercontinental journey of a loggerhead sea turtle, opens with two spreads that precede its title page. Readers meet Yoshi inside an egg, “before she had a name.” Folded within a shell, the little turtle waits until “the voice of the waves” calls her to hatch and enter the world.
As Moore’s story begins, Yoshi is “small and broken,” wounded in the water and rescued by fishermen who name her Yoshitaro. She finds a new home and heals at an aquarium in Cape Town, South Africa, much to the delight of the aquarium’s visitors. But after some time, Yoshi knows that she needs to return to the ocean: “She is from away from here, and that is where she needs to go.”
The scientists who brought Yoshi back to health attach a tracking device to her shell and release her into the ocean. The rest of Moore’s book tracks Yoshi’s extraordinary three-year journey up the eastern coast of Africa, as far north as Angola, then back around the southern tip of the continent and all the way across the Indian Ocean to waters off the northwestern coast of Australia—a distance of 25,000 miles!
Moore gives this remarkable true story an appealing structure. The refrain “This is Yoshi . . .” grounds readers in each new location along the turtle’s journey. As Yoshi sets out on her trip, the story’s brisk pace keeps readers turning pages. Each time Yoshi surfaces above the waves, allowing her tracker to send a signal to a satellite, we read in a looping cursive font: “Hello from Yoshi. I am here.” The narrative pacing slows as the turtle nears Australia, where she transmits one final, emotionally satisfying message, displayed in large letters that span the entire spread: “Hello from Yoshi. I am home.”
Moore illustrates this tale in sweeping full-bleed views of the worlds above and below the waves. Readers discover these worlds along with Yoshi as she takes in all the wonders of ocean life. Moore’s language is precise but also lyrical as she notes the “shape of a wave, the shift of the wind, the push of a current.” The book’s detailed back matter, which includes a photograph of Yoshi, will inspire readers to revisit the turtle’s story, equipped with the context to fully appreciate her astonishing voyage.
With vivid emotion, Lindsay Moore tells the astonishing story of a loggerhead turtle who traveled more than 25,000 miles from South Africa to Australia.
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