Wheels at Work: In the City; Wheels at Work: In the Country, by Don Kilby, Kids Can, 24 pages, $16.95, ages 3 to 7
Garbage truck, field sprayer, big-city and rural school buses, fire engine, livestock trailer and chip wagon are just a few of the city and country wheels featured in this pair of books, a continuation of Kilby's Wheels at Work series.
The "work" each vehicle does is described in the just-enough-detail text that accompanies the illustration. So, for instance, readers will learn that when the garbage truck maw is full, "a worker pulls a lever and the truck squishes the load and shoves it deep into the hold."
The biggest attractions of both of these books are Kilby's acrylic paintings. His palette of burnt sienna, ochre and moody blue, among others, is not the obvious one for this subject material or this audience; the results are paintings with depth and big-wheeled vehicles with heft.
More Arts Stories
Beneath the Bridge, by Hazel Hutchins, illustrated by Ruth Ohi, Annick, 24 pages, $8.95 ages 2 to 5
The paper boat looks large when it begins its voyage, launched from the bank of a trickle of a stream. The wide-eyed boy whose boat this is has constructed a twig bridge resting on pebbles, under which his boat will float.
The double-page spread, almost entirely given over to Ruth Ohi's gentle, woodland watercolours, is interrupted by an equally gentle ditty: "Beneath the bridge/ water flows/ Where it's headed/ no one knows./ Travelling merrily along --/ my small boat."
"My small boat" travels merrily along, passing under increasingly bigger bridges, from a branch over the widened stream to a covered bridge to a many-arched city bridge to a multi-spanned bridge that marks the point where the river empties into the sea. Always the ditty accompanies the boat, enlarging to encompass the busier and busier riverside life, from "frogs goggle, rushes grow" to "Cars and trucks on ribboned roads./ Diesel trains with heavy loads./ Giant ships, giant cranes,/ giant dock spouts loading grain."
A riverine adventure whose lilting rhyme will carry readers along from small beginnings to large outpourings -- not unlike life itself.
When Cats Go Wrong, by Norm Hacking, illustrated by Cynthia Nugent, Raincoast, 32 pages, $24.95, ages 4 to 8
Cats go wrong, or can do, when left to their own devices. Leave a naughty cat at home alone and suddenly the goldfish bowl is empty, the ornaments once high upon a shelf are shards scattered on the floor.
There's worse to come ("cat hair on the tablecloth/ And tongue marks on the butter"), but the general drift can be summed up by this refrain, sung accompanied by the accordion: "Life with a naughty kitty/ Isn't very pretty./ So I sing this mournful song/ About when cats go wrong."
This is no ordinary melancholy ode to cats, naughty or otherwise. This is a song, a tango composed and written by folk artist Norm Hacking and lavishly illustrated with thick daubs of paint in the manner of a Toulouse Lautrec. It all seems to prove that words, music and illustration played appassionato become hilarious when deployed in the service of a cat gone wrong.
Animals and Their Mates: How Animals Attract, Fight for and Protect Each Other, by Pamela Hickman, illustrated by Pat Stephens, Kids Can, 40 pages, $6.95, ages 7 to 11
In its introduction, this book promises to tell its readers why mice mate when they are only months old and female grizzly bears wait for six or seven years to do so. Also promised are answers to questions about how an orangutan finds a mate in its vast habitat and why an osprey never has to go far afield to find one. Animals and Their Mates delivers on its introductory promise, and much more.
Pat Stephens's limpid and lovely watercolours provide the visuals for mating arcana involving a number of species. Female Mormon crickets fight each other, vying to be the one to receive the "choosy" male's sperm package. Fiercely territorial two-tonne male elephant seals attempt to crush their rivals by throwing themselves forward and trying to land on top of them. Male horned animals like Dall sheep, deer, moose and elk will bash heads and antlers, sometimes locking horns, which can result in death by starvation for both animals.
Heck Superhero, by Martine Leavitt, Red Deer, 144 pages, $22.95, 12 and up
Heck, the 13-year-old protagonist of this novel, is homeless. His mother has ignored a series of notices about arrears in rent and the landlord has changed the locks of their apartment. Heck can spend weekends at the home of his good friend Spence, but not school nights. So Heck sleeps in a car in the parking lot of the apartment that is no longer his home, forages for food in malls and doesn't go to school.
In losing his home, Heck is without two essential ingredients in his life. First, he loses his art portfolio, which includes the project he is working on; Heck can't bear to tell his art teacher and mentor that this has happened. Nobody must know that anything is awry in Heck the superkid's life.
More important, though, Heck has lost his mother, a much-loved single mom for whom chronic absenteeism from life itself is a modus vivendi. She has simply disappeared, and this time Heck fears the worst.
Yet another young adult "problem" novel? Fear not. Martine Leavitt uses these plot elements to spin a magical tale, one that incorporates the interior life and dialogue of an entirely original character in an entirely original way.
Heck Superhero propels its readers into realms they may scarcely have dreamed of. As a novel, it manages to be both exhilarating and profoundly moving.
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