Yo Baby!, written and illustrated by Roslyn Schwartz, Annick, 24 pages, $5.95, ages 6 months to 3 years Roslyn Schwartz has gained a considerable following with her Mole Sister series, tiny books for tiny people about two seemingly sightless moles much given to pithy, albeit monosyllabic, statements on the state of their universe. At the risk of mixing metaphors, it can be said with certainty that the mistress of junior metaphysics has hit another home run with this, the quintessential baby book.
This is a book in which one thing leads to another, so that its opening statement, "Yo Baby!" emblazoned in bold, black print on a banana-yellow first page, is followed by a second page on which a winged, large-eyed creature sitting on a banana leaf says, "I'm not a baby, I'm a -- [turn the page]butterfly." Giraffe, pineapple, newspaper, handsome hound, desert island, soap bubbles, big hairy ape and, last, baby, each and every word and phrase an essential vocabulary building block, are the visual and verbal delights that await the curious. Alphabeasts, written and illustrated by Wallace Edwards, Kids Can, 32 pages, $19.95, all ages A mixture of the baroque and the surreal, this highly original and most appealing ABCDarium begins with a startling image on its first page. On a plush red armchair in a room with green-and-beige William Morris-ish wallpaper and a reading lamp with a tiger-skin lampshade, lies an alligator. Its tail, with scales so real you won't want to touch, is draped over the back of the chair. Its chin rests on a chintz footstool. Beneath this painting is the caption: "A is for Alligator, awake from a dream."
"B is for Bat, slurping ice cream." explains the opposite page, on which a bat with piercing eyes dips a bright pink tongue into a melting sundae, part of a still life that includes chocolates, an apple, a spoon and a lollipop. The bat is perched on a hammer which floats in midair. Stranger and stranger. And so it continues without missing a beat -- clever, arresting and thought-provoking through to Z. City Signs, by Zoran Milich, Kids Can, 32 pages, $16.95, ages 2 to 5 No words are required because the signs say it all in this book of photographs of familiar city sights. The photographs are full colour, which in other hands might have made the subject matter all too predictable -- what can you do, after all, with yellow schoolbuses and white-and-blue police cars? Zoran Milich is no ordinary photographer, though, proof of which -- if proof were required -- was established in his earlier book, The City ABC Book.
In this book, because of the angle of the shot, or a rain-slicked street, or blurring caused by speed, well-known signed city sights like a litter basket, an ambulance, a car wash or a speed bump achieve the status of icons, which is no mean feat. The Rumor: A Jataka Tale from India, written and illustrated by Jan Thornhill, Maple Tree Press, 32 pages, $17.95, ages 3 to 8 Words like "rumour" and "worrywort" will be intriguing additions to junior vocabularies, but that's not all this book has to offer. Other pluses are sumptuous paintings of thousands of animals in free flow across its pages, and the cumulative pleasures of counting in thousands, not ones and twos. And, of course, there's the story itself, a retelling of a traditional tale that can't be trumped.
The rumour began once upon a time, in India, where a young hare who worried about everything became obsessed with the notion that the world was about to fall apart. As she settled down for her nap -- a time when she did her best worrying -- this worrywort wondered what would happen to her if her fears were borne out. At that very moment a ripe mango fell to the ground beside her. " 'OH, NO!' she cried. 'The world is breaking up!' "
She fled. She didn't look to see what had made the noise, she just ran through the mango grove, passing on the news that the world was breaking up to another hare. And so a rumour was born and before long a thousand hares -- a veritable river of hares -- were running through the grove, soon to be joined by a thousand boars, a thousand deer, a thousand tigers and a thousand rhinoceroses.
Through thicket, marshland and forest, and across frieze-like pages, this glorious stampede of rumour-ridden, multicoloured animals surges. Only the wisdom of a lion can stop it in its tracks, and return worrrywort to the rumour's source. Solomon's Tree, written by Andrea Spalding, illustrated by Janet Wilson, Orca, 32 pages, $19.95, ages 4 to 8 The maple tree beside young Solomon's British Columbia house was special. It was very old and very capacious, and it shared its secrets with Solomon. Every afternoon, Solomon climbed up its "knobby trunk and curled up in his favourite notch. 'Hello tree,' he whispered and stroked the rough bark. 'Hello Solomon,' the tree rustled back. Its branches cradled his body."
Over the years, the maple introduced Solomon to the intricately woven hummingbird's nest in its branches and the butterfly chrysalis hidden in its bark. During winter's wind and rain, the old tree creaked out lullabies for a sleeping Solomon. And then, during a midwinter storm, the tree falls. Solomon has lost his friend and he is desolate. His family cuts the tree into logs and fills the woodshed.
Except for one last log. Out of that log, Solomon's uncle, with Solomon's help, carves a mask for Solomon in the Tsimpshian tradition, incorporating some of the denizens of the tree in the mask's painted designs. "Hello tree," Solomon says to his finished mask, parts of whose intricate and beautiful decoration grace each page of this book. " 'Hello Solomon,' the mask whispered back." As Long as the Rivers Flow, by Larry Loyie with Constance Brissenden, illustrated by Heather D. Holmlund, Groundwood, 48 pages, $18.95, ages 10 and up "In 1944, Larry Loyie, who was then known as Lawrence, was 10 years old and living with his family near Slave in northern Alberta, Canada. This is his story."
Thus begins an account of an idyllic childhood in northern Canada, one terminated when Lawrence was 10 when he and his siblings were removed from their parents' home and taken to the residential school, St. Bernard's Mission, in northern Alberta.
The body of this book is a vivacious rendition of a prelapsarian world of extended family, a pet owl named Ooh-Hoo, fishing, gathering berries and medicinal plants; of beaver and moose and an enormous grizzly felled by Lawrence's granny's shotgun. Lawrence is beginning to imagine himself taking his place as a hunter and fisherman among his kin. All of his burgeoning sense of self ends when the truck comes to take the children away.
The epilogue to this poignant book contains photographs of Lawrence and his brothers and sister on the steps of the mission school. These grim black-and-white photographs stand in stark juxtaposition to the limpid watercolours that illustrate Lawrence's earlier life. The Secret Life of Owen Skye, by Alan Cumyn, Groundwood, 176 pages, $8.95, ages 8 to 12 Adult readers know Alan Cumyn for his novels, the latest of which, Burridge Unbound, was short-listed for the Giller Prize in 2000. This, his first children's book, though written for children, will probably be of equal or even greater interest to adult readers.
The book is a series of linked episodes in the life of Owen Skye, the middle son in a family of boys who live with their parents, Horace and Margaret, in somewhat straitened circumstances (i.e. buckets are strategically placed throughout the house to catch the rain that comes through the holes in the roof; occasionally, the bed the boys share must be moved out of the line of fire, so to speak).
The time is not now; it could be the forties or the fifties or the sixties, but whenever the events in this novel occurred, it was a time when a large part of the lives of small boys -- outside school and meals and chores -- could still be feral, secret and beyond parental oversight and interpretation. Brushes with death and disaster are the norm: Railroad tracks feature hugely, as does an encounter with the mythical and terrifying Bog Man. Owen's speechless and unrequited adoration of his classmate Sylvia is just one of the highlights in this elegantly written and very, very funny book. The Big Book of Canada: Exploring the Provinces and Territories, by Christopher Moore, illustrations by Bill Slavin, Tundra, 255 pages, $39.99, ages 9 and up This is a big book, in both size and scope. However, as Janet Lunn's introduction makes clear, despite its atlas size, it is not intended to be the last word in regard to Canada's history and geography. Rather, it is what Lunn calls a gazetteer, "a compendium of informative and entertaining chapters about Canada's 10 provinces and three territories."
The Big Book moves relentlessly across the continent from east to west, spewing out lore as it goes. Bill Slavin's inimitable watercolours, supplemented by black-and-white and colour photographs, add their own touch of whimsy to this excellent addition to school or home bookshelf. Each province's or territory's story is broken down into subsections, beginning with a general statement about the province and continuing on through Landscapes (salient features), Moments (important and occasionally idiosyncratic dates; a case in point: 1970 was the year of the ill-fated Bricklin car in New Brunswick), Peoples (again, in the case of New Brunswick, the Maliseet, the Loyalists, the Acadians and the Irish), On the Map (places of interest), Work (i.e. principal occupations), Famous and Infamous (people) and so on.
The cover, inside and out, is a Slavin-esque map of Canada which helps to tie up all the pieces. The recipes (receipts?) for Elegant Baked Potatoes (P.E.I.) and Blueberry Grunt (N.S.) look delicious. Fractures: Family Stories, by Budge Wilson, Penguin, 195 pages, $16, ages 10 and up Some of the 12 stories in this collection have been published before -- The Metaphor and Mr. Manuel Jenkins,for instance, are from Wilson's The Leaving,published in 1991. In all these stories, though, new or old, very good or quite simply excellent, Wilson flatters her young adult (or adult) readers' intelligence with the precision of her insight into the lives of her adolescent characters, and with a quality of prose not often found in literature for this age group. Her abundant gifts for telling stories with meanings that lie somewhat below the waterline are very evident in this collection.
The title, Fractures, provides the organizing principle for the collection. "A fracture," Wilson writes in her introduction, "is not always a break. Usually it's a crack, and sometimes a small one. The families in these stories are often fractured -- seldom entirely broken, but flawed on several levels."
Many of the characters in these stories are waking up for the first time to the reality that surrounds them: a father's inchoate anger -- and, for that matter, a mother's -- engraved, in the latter case, in the newly observed lines between her eyebrows, or her distance or impatience. These are the signs of the fault lines that lie beneath the surface of family life. The sad strains, minor chords, actually, of abuse, alcoholism and overweaning parental ambition for a child weave their way through these stories, but so too does the sweet painfulness -- and hopefulness -- of first love.