Julie Danielson

Children are natural explorers, traversing their world with wide eyes and delving into their own imaginations with curiosity and gusto. Two new picture books put adventures on the map for eager preschool and elementary-age readers.

Before we even get to the title page of author and illustrator Deborah Marcero’s My Heart Is a Compass, readers are treated to a spread showing a group of children in an elementary school classroom, reading silently on their own. And we see that our blue-haired, brown-skinned protagonist has chosen to read an atlas with a map at the ready. Her name is Rose, and she longs to be “an explorer, a pioneer, a trailblazer.” Show-and-tell is tomorrow, and Rose is determined to discover something new to share with her class. Since she doesn’t know precisely where that thing might be, she draws her own maps before setting out: “Her imagination became a blueprint, with her heart a compass.”

Rose’s journey includes the intricate, imaginative maps she so carefully draws—a road map, a sky map, an ocean map and a map of the mountains—but she returns home with no exciting or unusual discovery. However, she realizes that the four lovingly rendered and hand-drawn maps clutched to her chest are treasures themselves, and she shares them with her inquisitive classmates.

Rose’s maps are visual delights, filled with both geographical information (the sky map includes “thermosphere,” “exosphere,” etc.),  map vocabulary and plenty of her imaginative musings. (The mountain map includes a secret lair and “Blue Dragon Smoky Mountains.”) Marcero’s textured mixed-media illustrations are filled with inviting patterns that make up features like sandy beaches, bumpy mountains and waves in the water. My Heart Is a Compass is a tribute to the exciting adventures a child’s imagination can launch.

Joyce Hesselberth’s Mapping Sam shares Marcero’s sense of adventure, but it features a furry, four-legged and whiskered protagonist. Sam is a cat, and once she puts her family to bed, she slips out of the house to explore at night, and readers are privy to the adventures that unfold in Hesselberth’s sleek illustrations with rich, nighttime colors and crisp, clean lines.

Hesselberth illustrates Sam’s journey for readers with a simple map of the cat’s neighborhood that includes a compass and scale. But things take a surprising turn when Hesselberth lays out an altogether different type of map—a diagram of Sam’s inner workings as she strolls through the grass. This is followed by a transportation map; the diagram of a flower and its parts; a cutaway map showing the depth of a pond; a diagram of a water molecule; a world map; a diagram of our solar system; a constellation chart and a blueprint. All of these different maps and diagrams are seamlessly woven into Sam’s journey as she explores nature and ponders the starlit sky. Information about each type of map is appended. “Can you map a dream?” the author asks, as Sam arrives home to see one of her humans snuggled comfortably in bed. “You might try.” Readers may be eager to do so, as well as explore a variety of other types of maps, after reading both of these informative stories. Bon voyage!

Vincent van Gogh famously said that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day. Two new picture books about imaginative nighttime adventures prove the validity of this claim.

If it wasn’t already clear from award-winning team Philip and Erin Stead’s previous books, Music for Mister Moon demonstrates that these two really get introverts. In the first pages, we meet a cello-playing girl named Harriet Henry with long bangs hanging in her eyes. She loves playing her instrument, but only for her stuffed animals. She’d rather not play for crowds, thanks very much.

One night she strikes up a conversation with the moon after inadvertently knocking him from the sky with a teacup she throws in frustration at a loud owl. Mister Moon sometimes tires of being the moon and would like, for once, to float on a lake. With great determination, as well as the help of some friends (including the owl with whom she makes amends), Harriet makes that wish come true. After hauling the moon back up to the sky, Harriet plays her music for “no one but Mister Moon.”

With monoprint illustrations done in oil inks, along with additional flourishes in colored pencil, illustrator Erin Stead subtly anthropomorphizes the moon and creates exquisitely expressive characters and indelible images, like Harriet pulling the massive Mister Moon in a small wagon and rowing him in a frail boat on the lake.

Although she has help, it is the resourceful Harriet who primarily moves the story forward, and author Philip Stead gives her tremendous agency (and a sharp imagination). She makes herself a ladder to retrieve the moon, and she makes the wagon used for transporting him. She can even “change her room into a little house” so that she can make her cello sing. With a superb balance between text and art, Music for Mister Moon is a vivid journey into a child’s nuanced inner world.

David Zeltser’s tale of adventure, The Night Library, is inspired by Patience and Fortitude, the lions sculpted from pink Tennessee marble that guard the main entrance of the New York Public Library. The story—rendered by illustrator Raúl Colón with reverence, energy, cool blue hues for the night sky and warm earth tones for indoors—is told from the point of view of a young boy on the eve of his 8th birthday. He is disappointed when his parents give him a book, but later that night, he is greeted by a lion named Fortitude who stands outside his bedroom window. They take off together on a night journey into the “heart of the frozen city” and to the library, where the boy meets the second lion and tours the building with his new feline friends.

In the children’s section, the books fly off the shelves and form themselves into iconic book characters, such as Peter Rabbit and Mr. McGregor. The boy is moved to see another set of books form itself into the shape of his grandpa, reading to him. Before the boy heads home on the back of Patience, the boy spends quiet time in the library falling in love with literature, reading books he once shared with this grandfather. He writes it off the next day as a dream—until he finds a new library card, just for him, on the doormat outside his home.

Children’s books about the importance of reading are a dime a dozen, but The Night Library resonates on another level as it is also the story of a boy’s lingering grief following the loss of his grandfather. But sometimes richly colored stories can provide healing as well as adventure.

Julie Danielson conducts interviews and features of authors and illustrators at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a children's literature blog primarily focused on illustration and picture books.

The thrill of a big snowfall. Snow angels. Snow days! These three picture books celebrate the snowy season. 

Some Snow Is . . .

Ellen Yeomans’ Some Snow Is . . . revels in winter, exploring how wildly different each snowfall can be. There’s First Snow (the “we’ve waited for so long snow”) and Spring Snow (“time to go away snow”), with lots of variations in between. There’s Yellow Snow (uh oh, watch out) and Sledding Snow, which takes your breath away and freezes your face. Yeomans also explores the emotional extremes of such weather—from the frustration of light, early-winter Fluff Snow that doesn’t stick, to the complicated relationship with Driveway Snow, which makes Papa growl but also allows the building of a snow fort, which succeeds in making Papa smile. 

Illustrator Andrea Offermann takes readers on this journey with three children, best friends eager for outdoor winter play. She juxtaposes vivid colors against the bright white of snowfall. In one striking spread, we see a field of snow angels formed by a group of happy children, the text reading merely, “A flock of angels sing.” On a spread about Snow Day snow, Offermann’s energetic pen-and-ink lines nearly conceal houses in “a world of swirling white.” 

Yeomans writes in pleasing, flowing rhymes that form paired stanzas, with the first three lines of each stanza ending with “snow.” It all makes for an engaging read-aloud. 

Snowy Race

It’s another wondrous, wintry world in April Jones Prince’s Snowy Race. A young girl rides with her father in his snowplow. She has been counting down to this day and now feels abundant pride at the opportunity to help. But the snowplow does more than just clear the roads; it also takes the two of them to meet someone special at the train station, kicking off a thrilling race to reach a family member they love. 

Prince effectively uses short rhyming phrases (“whirl of snow”) and simple sentences (“off we go”), making this briskly paced tale a winning storytime choice. Prince writes with bustling verbs—slip, slide, chase, spin, whistling, howling, climbing, growling—as the plow chugs along, the snowy winds accumulate and father and daughter, always smiling, brave the elements. 

The page turns on these landscape-oriented spreads are especially compelling as the vehicle plows through the snow toward its destination. At one point, illustrator Christine Davenier even puts readers in the vehicle, seated behind father and daughter as we look through the windshield with them. Reds, greens and blues pop off these snowy-white spreads, as do the lemony yellows of the snowplow’s headlights and the sun trying to peek through winter clouds. 

The final spread is a wordless one, showing a family happy to be together—warm, safe and snug inside on a frigid winter’s day. Look closely at the opening and closing endpapers to see the impressive amount of snow that fell during the adventure.  

Almost Time

Written by Newbery Honor recipient Gary D. Schmidt and his late wife, Elizabeth Stickney (a pseudonym), Almost Time is a story about anticipating the turning of the seasons. Ethan is eager for winter’s exit, when the warmer weather causes the sap from the trees to run. But for now, there’s no maple syrup on his pancakes, cornbread or oatmeal. He must wait patiently for the days to heat up and the nights to get shorter. 

One day, he discovers a loose tooth. Eager to pull it, Ethan now has “two things to wait for.” Even children unfamiliar with the process of collecting and boiling sap—which illustrator G. Brian Karas depicts in three of the book’s final spreads—can relate to this story, because all children know how interminably slow time creeps when they’re excited for something to happen. 

Karas depicts the joys of sledding and chopping wood in a cozy, wintry-white world, even if Ethan wears an impatient scowl as he does these things. He’d rather be single-mindedly wriggling his tooth, thanks very much, or trying “not to think about maple syrup.” Once the sap starts to run, his tooth also comes out; it was all worth the wait. Spreads dominated by white snow make way for a closing spread of warm greens, as the snow melts and Ethan finally gets sweet maple syrup on his pancakes. 

When there’s thunder and lightning, people and wild creatures alike head for safe places to stay dry and ride out dangerous weather. Two beautiful and reassuring new picture books relate stories of characters who shelter together during summer thunderstorms. 

Together We Grow is the debut picture book from Susan Vaught, neuropsychologist by day and author by night, who has something to say about inclusion in this tale of barn creatures facing a harsh nighttime storm. In spare, eloquent rhyming couplets—“Lightning gash! Windy lash!”—the book opens as fierce weather drives a frightened fox and its cubs to a barn full of animals. After the animals tell the fox to scram (“Go away! We’re full today!”), a small, unassuming duck heads outside to assist the fox family and convince the other animals to allow some space in the barn—and in their hearts. 

Illustrator Kelly Murphy employs a color palette of deep, rich blues that juxtapose marvelously against the vivid oranges and yellows of the foxes, the duck and the warm light of the barn’s interior. Several spreads, including those toward the end of the book when the storm has passed, are lush and cinematic, and Murphy wields light and shadow to dramatic effect. The two-page spread in which the duck calls to the fox and its family to invite them inside is particularly striking; the duck stands in front of a block of yellow interior barn light, which accentuates the hope and promise embedded in an otherwise foreboding scene. Unusual perspectives and angles, many of them aerial, make for visually dynamic moments. 

Vaught’s depiction of furry farm life leans toward anthropomorphism, avoiding the messy biology of the food chain as it delivers a poignant message about embracing those who are different and caring for neighbors during difficult circumstances: “Learn and show / together we grow.” 

When the Storm Comes also unfolds in rhyming couplets, but author Linda Ashman adds a call-and-response structure: “Where do you go when the sky turns gray— / When the grasses bend and the treetops sway? / We gather here below the eaves. / We roost beneath some sturdy leaves.” Ashman’s use of the first-person collective “we” suggests that we’re all in this together. Like Vaught, Ashman considers how various creatures, including humans, respond to dangerous weather. Some of these creatures—a house cat, a pet dog—dwell indoors, while others, such as a hive of bees and a family of rabbits nestled in a hollow log, make their homes outside. Ashman’s narrative continues into the storm’s aftermath, depicting both cleanup efforts and a communal celebration of sunny skies. 

Illustrator Taeeun Yoo sets When the Storm Comes in a coastal town; among the humans’ preparation efforts, boats must be latched and tied in this neck of the woods. The comforting curves of Yoo’s linework give way to harder lines of flashing lightning and driving rains as the tempest arrives. Though storms are scary, there’s a cozy feeling when all the humans, along with the pet dog, gather inside to play a game, share stories and “curl up tight.” Once the storm has passed, Yoo returns to her signature soft and warm illustrations in this satisfying story of community.

These two books offer children an empathetic look at what it’s like for animals who fear storms just like we humans do. Readers will be comforted to see communities come together to stay safe during wild weather.