This New Baby
By Teddy Jam, illustrated by Virginia Johnson, Groundwood Books, 22 pages, $8.95, ages 0 to 3
In her first book-illustration project, noted textile designer Virginia Johnson brings her trademark touches of scintillating colour and deft, oblique design to a board book by the late and much-lamented Teddy Jam (a.k.a. Matt Cohen). The book is an extended poem that begins, “This new baby sleeps in my arms like a moon sleeping on a cloud/ like apples falling through rain/ like a fish swimming through a sky …” Any new mother, father or grandparent, any new baby, will willingly surrender herself, himself, to the thrall of these words and pictures.
The Circle Game
By Joni Mitchell, illustrated by Brian Deines, Dancing Cat Books, 32 pages, $20, ages 3 to 6
Brian Deines’s glorious illustrations bring a beloved song, The Circle Game, to new life for a new generation as well as for older ones. They play imaginatively on the theme of the song, the circularity of time and life in Mitchell’s reprise: “And the seasons they go round and round/ And the painted ponies go up and down./ We’re captive on the carousel of time.” Mitchell’s magic is more than reciprocated in Deines’s luminescent oils, in many of which circles and orbs, Klimt-like, “go round and round and round in the circle game.”
Molito
By Rosemary Sullivan and Juan Opitz, illustrated by Colleen Sullivan, Black Moss Press, 48 pages, $18, ages 4 to 7
“Deep under the ground lived a little mole named Molito. His fur was brown, the colour of burnt toast. His eyes were yellow as the sun.” Thus begins a picture-book collaboration by noted Canadian biographer Rosemary Sullivan, Chilean exile Juan Optiz and Sullivan’s artist sister, Colleen. Molito lives happily with his friends in an underground world of tunnels. He dreams, though, of the world above ground. It’s a dangerous one, he discovers, but a wonderful one, where he finds new friends to play his music with. Torn between his old world and his new, he digs a tunnel from one to the other, from darkness to light. Molito is a potent allegory for life in Pinochet’s Chile, but that doesn’t overpower words and images that dance on the page.
A Few Blocks
Written and illustrated by Cybèle Young, Groundwood Books, 48 pages, $18.95, ages 4 to 7
It’s only a few blocks from Ferdie’s and his older sister Viola’s home to their school, but it’s a distance that Ferdie is reluctant to travel: “He didn’t want to go to school. ‘Not now,’ he said. ‘Maybe never.’ ” Not now, maybe never, is a mantra he digs out of his figurative pocket several times on the way to school, despite the enticements Viola offers: Flights into fantasy worlds that boggle Ferdie’s mind and, ingeniously constructed in collage and watercolours by Young, will do the same to other small Ferdies and Violas. In a neat little flip at the end of this enchantment, it’s Ferdie who entices Viola to walk the last few blocks to school.
Ankylosaur Attack
By Daniel Loxton, illustrated by Daniel Loxton with Jim W.W. Smith, Kids Can, 32 pages, $16.95, ages 4 to 7
A dinosaur is a thing with feathers, as recent discoveries in Alberta have confirmed, but there is nothing downy about the ankylosaur at the centre of this “clash of the titans” tale. Heavily armoured with plates and a club-like tail, the massive (“As long as a mid-sized moving truck”) vegetarian almost meets his match, while defending an ancient and wounded ankylosaur, in the jaws of an even larger, meat-eating member of the Tyrannosaurus rexs. A combination of minimal text containing maximal information and computer-generated, photo-realistic images of the creatures in their natural setting makes Loxton’s book a mind-blower/eyeball popper for that dino-crazy species that lives among us.
Dear Baobab
By Cheryl Foggo, illustrated by Qin Leng, Second Story, 24 pages, $15.95, ages 6 to 8
