WIGGLE GIGGLE TICKLE TRAIN
By Nora Hilb and Sharon Jennings, illustrated by Nora Hilb with photographs by Marcela Cabezas Hilb, Annick, 32 pages, $19.95, ages 2 to 5
“Up with the sunrise, color it bright./ Dazzle and sparkle, such fiery light./ Good morning!”
So begins an eventful, busy day of small-fry activity, captured in watercolours and photographs and by ditties that make any resistance to wiggling, giggling and tickling most unlikely.
The first double-page spread consists of a photograph of a “fiery” sunrise on the left-hand page, and a watercolour of a small red-headed person painting her version of a sunrise on the opposite page.
This counterpoint of photograph and painting on each spread continues to good effect throughout, the former adding concrete evidence of, say, sun, car, train, duck or horse, while the latter takes the more imaginative, “let's pretend” route. So, for instance, on the next double-page spread, three children and a dog form their own version of a train on one page, and a boldly painted train spreads itself across the facing page. The ditty is, “Train's in the station,/ pulling out fast./ Wiggle and giggle and tickle and laugh. Choo-choo!” At nightfall, a photograph of a pale quarter moon seems to gaze on the sleeping child opposite it. “Cut out the bright moon,/ hang it with thread./ Shimmering, glimmering, over my bed. Sleep tight!”
HARRY AND HORSIE
By Katie Van Camp, illustrated by Lincoln Agnew, Balzer & Bray, 32 pages, $22.50, ages 3 to 6
There's a note from Harry's dad on the first page of this book, telling kids to get ready for “an amazing bedtime adventure … you're about to hear the story of my son, Harry and his best pal, Horsie, and the night that … well. I'll let you find out for yourself.”
The note writer is David Letterman. A little jacket reading tells us that Katie Van Camp, one half of the Canadian writer/illustrator duo behind this picture book, had several previous incarnations, among them teaching ballet and kindergarten in Shanghai and working as an au pair in New York, looking after Harry (and, of course Harry's favourite toy, Horsie).
Lucky Harry. Katie Van Camp can tell a corker of a story. This one begins as a sleepless Harry (and Horsie) decides to take his Super Duper Bubble Blooper down from the shelf where it has been stowed for the night. In seconds, a giant bubble picks up Horsie and floats him out of the room and into the night sky. Harry puts on his helmet and goggles and boards his rocket ship. “Harry blasted past Venus and did a loop around Mars, but there was no sign of Horsie.”
He finds his racing cars on Saturn, roaring around the rings, but no Horsie. He finds Kitty in the Milky Way, her whiskers covered in milk, but no Horsie. Ah, then he spies something dangling from the end of the crescent moon. Soon enough, he's rescued his best pal and, hugging each other, they agree that they will never go anywhere without the other.
The indigo blue of the night sky (and Horsie) dominates the retro comic-style illustrations, casting its own nicely crepuscular light on a story that will appeal to all small fry who can't or won't be separated from a favourite toy.
YOU'RE MEAN, LILY JEAN
By Frieda Wishinsky, illustrated by Kady MacDonald Denton, North Winds Press, 32 pages, $19.99, ages 3 to 8
The illustrations for this book, we are told, (on that formal fist page of a book that deals with weighty matters such as copyright) “were first sketched in a light (H) pencil, then painted using Winsor and Newton watercolours. They were finished with acrylic ink lines, oil crayon accents, occasional gouache and a dash of salt.” As might be expected then, a fine and fey insouciance governs Denton's pencil and brush in her delightful illustrations for an equally delightful tale.
Before Lily Jean moves in next door, Carly and her older sister Sandra are inseparable, playing explorers, pirates, mountain climbers and astronauts. But then the charismatic Lily Jean moves in, Lily Jean who “wore shiny red shoes and a puffy red skirt,” Lily Jean who brags that she can play the xylophone and drums and stand on her head and skate backward.
At first, Sandra, Lily Jean's designated playmate, is in her thrall and goes along with LJ's strictures about how and when Carly can join them. It's not pretty: Carly will be the cow when the older girls play cowgirls, for example. When Lily Jean orders Carly to play the dog to her king and Sandra's queen, the worm turns. Sandra refuses to go along with this plan and in a deft, amusing and, frankly, awesome “power play,” the sisters manoeuvre their willful playmate, the formerly mean Lily Jean into behaving well. The penultimate words in this book? “‘Can you be nice?' asked Carly. ‘I can be very nice,' said Lily Jean.”
TIMMERMAN WAS HERE
By Colleen Sydor, illustrated by Nicolas Debon, Tundra, 32 pages, $21.99, ages 4 to 7
On a double-page spread of a shadowy garden, in which a girl sits motionless on a swing, observed by a motionless dog, are written the first words of this stunning picture book: “I had not intended to like Timmerman. In fact, I was stubbornly determined not to.”
The young girl who is the “I” in this picture book is mourning the loss of her grandfather, who has moved out of the family's house and into a senior citizen's home. When Timmerman, a stranger looking for lodging in return for odd jobs, is given Granddad's room, he has several strikes against him.
As the weeks pass, she tries to find fault with Timmerman, but his kindness to her and to her dog, Henrietta, persuade her that Timmerman is as good a man as he seems. What she hadn't realized was that it wouldn't be easy to believe in Timmerman, especially as the rumours start. An itinerant man who wanders about at night with a sack on his back, carrying a shovel, is an object of suspicion, if not fear, and the girl “catches” some of that fear, even if Timmerman never gave her “a reason to stop liking him.”
Looking for a book in his room one day, she discovers under his bed a muddy shovel and an old burlap sack. “The sight of that bag made me go cold inside. I thought about dead cats and stolen money. … Suddenly I wasn't sure about anything.” She goes to visit her grandfather, who advises her that if her gut tells her that Timmerman is a person just like her, “full of spit ‘n' goodness,” then she should continue to like him until he gives her a reason to stop.
Eventually, Timmerman leaves town, moving on to somewhere else. The following spring, the girl finds an answer to her lingering worry about Timmerman: “In every yard on the entire street sprouted hundreds and hundreds of tulips.”
Perfect pacing, a spare but rich narrative and quietly evocative paintings combine here to glorious effect.
IT'S A SNAP! George Eastman's First Photograph
By Monica Kulling, illustrated by Bill Slavin, Tundra, 32 pages, $19.99, ages 4 to 8
Tired and bored with his banking job, George Eastman, who had been helping to support his mother since he was 14, is persuaded by her to find a hobby. He liked pictures, but he certainly wasn't an artist. Perhaps he could make pictures with a camera instead of paint? Thus, in 1877, in Rochester, N.Y., was born the modern camera, and with it the first roll of film, the Brownie camera and the Eastman Kodak Company.
This picture book biography of George Eastman does a lovely job of conveying the excitement, disappointments and, ultimately, rewards of George's first forays into picture-taking, and his subsequent inventions.
Readers will observe that the first camera readers Eastman uses is the size of a microwave; the last is that of today's common size. Mention is made, too, by the end of this book, of the digital world that picture taking now inhabits.
Kulling injects this well-paced biography with humour, not a little of which is derived from incidents or moments such as the incredulous townspeople – the grocer, baker, blacksmith and cobbler – lining up behind Pied Piper George, “before you could say scrambled eggs,” to have their photographs taken, and from Eastman's mother's dry responses to her son's enthusiasms.
Slavin's watercolours are deliciously fanciful, but also belie their whimsy, providing a fuller picture of George than words can convey, as well as faithfully recording and rendering his progress and his inventions.
VIOLET
By Tania Duprey Stehlik, illustrated by Vanja Vuleta Jovanovic, Second Story Press, 24 pages, $14.95, ages 5 to 8
Violet is violet. Artist Jovanovic has painted a colourful, topsy-turvy world for her heroine to inhabit, and Violet is a stick-figure girl with a mop of black, spiky hair and pale purple skin. As we meet her, she is worrying about going to school, about fitting in with the other kids. Her stomach hurts, but her mother gets her up and out the door with a packed lunch that Violet says she intends to share with others. “It might help me make new friends,” she tells her mom.
“‘Oh Violet,' chided her Mom, ‘just be yourself. You don't need to give away your lunch to make new friends.'”
Violet has a good day at school, forgetting her worries as she hangs out with the other kids, “red kids, yellow kids and blue kids.” Violet is the only purple kid. All is well until her father comes to pick her up, when one of the kids asks, “Who's that?” When Violet says that he's her dad, her schoolmate asks, “Your dad is BLUE??!”
“Why is your dad blue, if you're not?” she wants to know. This is something Violet has never thought about before, but now it's all she can think about. Why isn't she blue or red? After all, if her mom was red and her dad was blue, why isn't she red or blue?
Her mom takes out a box of paints and mixing red and blue gets “a lovely purply-violet.” She explains to her daughter that people come in many colours and are valued for who they are, not what colour they are. When she's asked a day or two later why her mom is red, she's quick and assured with her answer: “‘My mom is red, my dad is blue, and I,' she said, grinning … am VIOLET!'”
WHAT CAME FIRST?
By Sandro Natalini, Tundra, 32 pages, $17.99, ages 6 to 9
What came first? Was it the chicken or the egg? These questions begin an enticing science book that explores the origins of our world, starting with the Big Bang. Using a variety of fonts, richly hued, not-quite-orthodox-looking creatures and a dramatic foldout on which cavort all manner of creatures – many, such as the woolly mammoth, now extinct – Natalini makes a compelling case for evolution, lauding, along the way, Charles Darwin's role in developing the theory.
He begins with the explosion almost 14 billion years ago that those in the know call the Big Bang, and moves his young scientists past the birth of the universe, through the formation of the first oceans and onto the primordial soup that nurtured the growth of organisms that eventually formed the basis of life on Earth.
The Paleozoic, Mesozoic, Tertiary and Quaternary Periods are described, and the ways and whys creatures have evolved or become extinct are postulated and explored. In the end, Natalini avers, it matters not which came first; what matters is that we acknowledge that the world is full of marvels and that we do all we can to protect the environment in which we humans and those marvels live.
JACOB TWO-TWO ON THE HIGH SEAS
By Cary Fagan, illustrated by Dusan Petricic, Tundra, 102 pages, $12.99; ages 7 to 11
During his lifetime Mordecai Richler wrote three Jacob Two-Two novels: Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang, Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur and Jacob Two-Two's First Spy Case. These novels have now reappeared with new pen-and-ink illustrations by the illustrious Dusan Petricic. Accompanying this trio is a new Jacob Two-Two with illustrations also by Petricic, but this time written by Cary Fagan. The broad humour and the full-bore, wonderful preposterousness of these four books makes them a great quartet of novels for young readers or for reading out.
If asked the question about how this Cary Fagan novel stacks up against Richler's Two-Twos, the answer would be very well indeed. This novel begins, reassuringly, in exactly the same satisfyingly ritualistic way its predecessors do: “Once there was a boy called Jacob Two-Two. He had two ears and two eyes and two arms and two feet and two shoes … etc.”
Seamlessly, the reader moves on to the crux of the matter here, which is Jacob's family's voyage from London, back to the city and land of his father's birth, Montreal, Canada. Tickets on the Queen Elizabeth II are not available, or so their father says, but the SS Spring-a-leak is sure to very nice, he assures them. And therein lies a tale.
Once on board, they meet the aptly named Captain Sparkletooth, the not-to-be-trusted first mate, Mr. Scrounger, and an interesting collection of fellow passengers. With scarcely time to unpack, Jacob and his new friend Cindy are taken down to the bowels of the ship and forced to do hard labour under the surprisingly benevolent eye of the ship's engineer, Mr. Morgenbesser. That it's going to be a difficult trip seems a sure thing, especially when pirates board the ship.
Without giving away too many details of life on the high seas, it can be revealed that by the time the Spring-a-Leak docks in Montreal, Jacob has had his seventh birthday and can now be called “Jacob two plus two plus two plus one brave boy.”
THUMB AND THE BAD GUYS
By Ken Roberts, illustrated by Leanne Franson, Groundwood, 120 pages, $12.95, ages 7 to 10
The third book in Ken Roberts' splendid Thumb series begins in a darkened school gym, just as a good-guys-versus-bad-guys film is ending. Watching it are 12-year-old Thumb, a.k.a. Leon, and his sage and sensible friend and sidekick, Susan. Why can't real life be more like movie life, Thumb wonders out loud. Wouldn't real life be more exciting with a few bad guys (or girls) thrown into the mix? “I mean,” Thumb says, trying to further his premise, “without bad guys, Harry Potter books would just be books about school.”
It's hard, though, to find any bad guys among the 143 souls living in New Auckland, the remote B.C. fishing village the pair calls home. There are no roads, so access and provisioning are by boat or plane, and the last time the police visited was a year ago, when a pair of vacationing policemen fishing offshore were looking for a place to stay.
Thumb and Susan decide to make their lives a little less uneventful by finding someone who might have a secret life as a bad guy. They fixate on the unwitting Kirk McKenna, whose habit of prolific and indiscriminate spitting would seem to make him the ideal candidate.
The sleuths follow Kirk up the mountain and discover that he has a secret hut, whereupon the plot thickens, details unfold, theories unravel, hilarity reigns and Ken Roberts scores another home run.
Leanne Franson's pen-and-ink drawings add to the fun, giving form and face to a motley crew of characters.
DEFINITELY NOT FOR LITTLE ONES: Some Very Grimm Fairy-Tale Comics
By Rotraut Susanne Berner, Groundwood, 48 pages, $19.95, ages 9 and up
These fairy tales – among them Tom Thumb, The Frog Prince, Rapunzel and Lucky Hans – do not always resolve with those oft-spoken words “and they lived happily ever after.” More often than not, Rotraut Susanne Berner's retellings offer a blunter, less starry-eyed ending, one in which the last words about the finally united pair, or reunited family members are “and they would still be alive today … if they hadn't died, that is.”
So, these are tales for the newly sophisticated, those with a stomach for a more cut-and-dried, less – shall we say – romantic tone to fairy tales that they may have known and loved, and an appetite for a new reading, both literally and figuratively.
These tales are told in comic form, which in itself offers a punchy, fast-paced and eye-appealing medium for expression. In Berner's rendering, the king's youngest and most beautiful daughter, the heroine of The Frog Prince, is no one's idea of a beauty, and her unkind behaviour toward the importuning frog is ... well, graphic.
