This week: Good friends, perfect snow, a new Thumbelina and more...
ME AND YOU
By Geneviève Côté, Kids Can, 32 pages, $16.95, ages 3 to 5
A white rabbit with floppy, pink-tipped ears, and a fuchsia pink piglet face each other on the first double-page spread of this sweet confection of a picture book. Each stands at an easel and wields a paintbrush. On the following pages, rabbit says to piglet, “I wish I were just like you,” and piglet responds, saying, “I wish I were just like you.”
The pair continues the rhyming duet on successive pages, each longing in the gentlest way to have the other's long ears, say, or curly lemon twist tail, or button nose, or the tallest toes. For good measure, they put on each other's ears and feet, with stripy socks serving as substitutes for the real appendages. When rabbit declares, “I would be daring and loud!” pig leaps into the air, declaring, “I would be dainty as a cloud!”
There is an “oof!” and an “oops!” as both parties fall back to earth, so to speak. With new eyes, they take a good, long look at each other and see that each looks like the other. “ I like it better when you are you!” each says to the other. Hand in hand, they sing their final duet: “I am me and you are you./ That's why we love/ each other, me and you!”
PERFECT SNOW
By Barbara Reid, Scholastic, 32 pages, $19.99, ages 3 to 8
“SNOW!” Jim said. Snow, lots of it, is what Jim and his buddy, Scott, see when they look out of their respective windows one wintry morning. The very best thing would be a “snow day” on this school day, but, failing that, “recess will be great!”
The recess bell sets off “a stampede. Kids swarmed the snow like ants on a dropped ice cream cone.” Jim, daydreaming in class, has planned the construction of “a totally massive, indestructible Snow Fortress of Doom.” Scott has set his heart on building “the World's Greatest Snowman.” Mayhem ensues, snow flies and there's a “blizzard of destruction” carried out by an army of bright figures on a battleground of snow before the collaborative compromise, the “World's Greatest Totally Massive Snowman Fort!”, has its brief moment in the sun.
Barbara Reid works her magic once again in her signature medium, Plasticine, but she has added another dimension here: pen and watercolour comic strips that surround and extend the action that the Plasticine figures and scenes depict. The effect is dynamic, and the felicitous combination of the media lends this winter's tale an excitement that, in this case, neither medium by itself could have achieved.
BELLA'S TREE
By Janet Russell, illustrated by Jirina Marton, Groundwood, 35 pages, $19.95, ages 4 to 7
This heart-stoppingly, liltingly lovely debut book is the winner of the 2009 Governor-General's Award for Children's Literature – Illustration. It comes from Newfoundland, at least its author does, and so does the Bella of the title. “Bella, the girl lived with her Nan and Bruno, the famous dog, on top of a hill overlooking the sea.”
Bella's Nan, her grandmother, was famous for her berry picking, but advancing age has meant that this year, on this snow-laden Dec. 22, “the berries that Nan had not picked that fall and the gulls had not eat were now under that snow, and that made Nan crooked. … ‘I haven't got it in me to get us a tree,'” she says. After verbal pyrotechnics and physical feats. Bella, “only a slip of a thing” in her grandmother's eyes, persuades her Nan that she can wield an axe and cut down a Christmas tree.
Three trees are brought home on successive days – a leafless alder, a spruce and a pine – each with a resident bird – and while none meets with her Nan's approval, each is put up and decorated. On Christmas morning, the fourth tree that Bella brings home, a fir, at last provokes a smile from Nan. Looking at the bare fir tree, though, Nan wishes that she hadn't used all her decorations on the other three.
