Picture Book Monday: Stellaluna
We spent much of today reinforcing Christmas books as we head into the home stretch of the Christmas book season (I imagine that post-Christmas, we will be inundated with Christmas books that were nearly loved to death), but I did get a chance to read Stellaluna, which I've been keeping an eye out for ever since asakiyume mentioned it when I posted about The Little Lost Bat.
It was...cute? It's chock full of lessons about the possibilities of overcoming differences to maintain friendships. They eat grasshoppers and fly in the day, you eat fruit and fly around all night, tomato, tomahto, no big deal, right? Plus the bat mother doesn't die in Stellaluna, so that's a plus.
So I can see why this is a book that rode the zeitgeist to glory, but it didn't do much for me personally.
I also read Neil Gaiman's Chu's First Day at School. Did you know Gaiman wrote picture books? I didn't. Honestly, I rather suspect his publisher said "Neil, if you knock off a picture book in an afternoon, it will sell like hotcakes to all those young parents who grew up mooning over The Sandman and Neverwhere."
This certainly would explain the thinness of the plot. The book is about a young panda bear named Chu, who goes to his first day of school, where the teacher asks all the students to tell the class their names and special talents. Chu goes last, and it turns out that his special talent is sneezing so hard that everything in the classroom goes flying, which everyone in the class thinks is just the best, apparently.
I feel that the class would have at least one unaccountably tidy student who would be extremely upset by this sneezing interloper who turns the whole room upside down. (I for one would not have appreciated it as a kindergartner.)
Having said this, I have never properly appreciated anything by Neil Gaiman except Coraline, and I'm a bit afraid to reread that now in case I can see the Gaiman-ness of it all and that spoils it for me.
Oh, oh, but I did rather enjoy Emily Gravett's Dogs, which is...well, it's a book about dog. Big ones! Small ones! Hairy ones! Bald ones! There isn't a story here, really, it's just a quick tour of the wide variety of dogs in the world: a nice book with a surprising end, rather like the other Emily Gravett book I read, The Odd Egg. Her books are not quite like anyone else's, which I think is why I like them.
It was...cute? It's chock full of lessons about the possibilities of overcoming differences to maintain friendships. They eat grasshoppers and fly in the day, you eat fruit and fly around all night, tomato, tomahto, no big deal, right? Plus the bat mother doesn't die in Stellaluna, so that's a plus.
So I can see why this is a book that rode the zeitgeist to glory, but it didn't do much for me personally.
I also read Neil Gaiman's Chu's First Day at School. Did you know Gaiman wrote picture books? I didn't. Honestly, I rather suspect his publisher said "Neil, if you knock off a picture book in an afternoon, it will sell like hotcakes to all those young parents who grew up mooning over The Sandman and Neverwhere."
This certainly would explain the thinness of the plot. The book is about a young panda bear named Chu, who goes to his first day of school, where the teacher asks all the students to tell the class their names and special talents. Chu goes last, and it turns out that his special talent is sneezing so hard that everything in the classroom goes flying, which everyone in the class thinks is just the best, apparently.
I feel that the class would have at least one unaccountably tidy student who would be extremely upset by this sneezing interloper who turns the whole room upside down. (I for one would not have appreciated it as a kindergartner.)
Having said this, I have never properly appreciated anything by Neil Gaiman except Coraline, and I'm a bit afraid to reread that now in case I can see the Gaiman-ness of it all and that spoils it for me.
Oh, oh, but I did rather enjoy Emily Gravett's Dogs, which is...well, it's a book about dog. Big ones! Small ones! Hairy ones! Bald ones! There isn't a story here, really, it's just a quick tour of the wide variety of dogs in the world: a nice book with a surprising end, rather like the other Emily Gravett book I read, The Odd Egg. Her books are not quite like anyone else's, which I think is why I like them.