Alas, alas - my library did not get me the next Caldecott book in time for my Monday read! WHATEVER SHALL I DO?

Well, fortuitously, next week's book is one that I already own and love and have in fact posted about before: Ox-Cart Man, written by Donald Hall and illustrated by Barbara Cooney. You might think that I would have run out of things to ( Read more... )

We've reached another Caldecott book that I'm familiar with from childhood! (And in fact we'll run into quite a few of them for the next twenty years of Caldecott books or so.) My parents actually owned Peter Spier's Noah's Ark, so I was quite familiar with it, although I must say it never was a favorite: the ark gets awfully dirty from having so ( Read more... )

I really enjoyed this week's Caldecott winner, Ashanti to Zulu: African Traditions. This is perhaps a bit surprising, given that it's illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon, who illustrated Why Mosquitos Buzz in People's Ears, about which I felt rather lukewarm - but the Dillons contain multitudes, it seems, and I really like the art style they chose ( Read more... )

At last the library got me a copy of the 2017 Caldecott Medal Winner! Javaka Steptoe's Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, a charming book about, well, what it says on the tin. The illustration style is unique & intriguing: Steptoe paints on boards, so each part of the picture is on its own board and they're all fitted ( Read more... )

Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears suffers a bit from coming a week after Arrow to the Sun, which had such gorgeous illustrations that almost everything would look a bit flat by comparison; the colors in Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears are more muted, and very nice in their way, but they don't cater to my preference for the eye-searing ( Read more... )

Arrow to the Sun: A Pueblo Indian Tale has absolutely gorgeous pictures. It's all bright colored geometric shapes pieced together on black backgrounds, very striking and bright, the kind of book where the cover stops you halfway across the library because it's so eye-catching ( Read more... )

Harve and Margot Zemach's Duffy and the Devil, the 1974 Caldecott winner, is another totally charming book. Young Duffy is hired as a maid to help with the spinning and knitting - except, alas, she can't spin! But fortunately, as she is sitting in the attic weeping dolefully over the "whillygogs and whizamagees" of the spinning wheel she has taken ( Read more... )

Arlene Mosel's The Funny Little Woman is a retelling of a Japanese folktale about a woman who chases a rice dumpling down a hole, only to follow it right into the realm of the oni, toothy monsters who make her into their cook. She loves cooking, so she sticks around for a while, but eventually she gets tired of cooking for oni all day and flees ( Read more... )

Today's Caldecott book: Nonny Hogrogian's One Fine Day. Which is about a fox! I like books about foxes.

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On a completely different note, lycoris linked me to this glorious video of Jurassic Park, High Heels Edition, which has everyone in the original Jurassic Park trilogy click-click-clicking around in heels. EVERYONE. Just look at those little tiny ( Read more... )

I was hoping to get the 2017 Caldecott winner in time for this Monday, but alas, everyone else has put it on hold at the library too so I don't have it yet. But! I did read the 1971 winner, A Story, A Story, which I enjoyed very much. It's a retelling of an Anansi story - in this case, how Anansi got the Sky God to release his cache of stories down ( Read more... )