Read all the Caldecott winners and honor winners to/ with my child

This project may drive me to begin editing wikipedia. I swear, their entries on these people and the Caldecott in general are so crappy. It takes me 10 minutes to figure out who these authors and illustrators are and what books they’ve done. Like it isn’t important that Marc Simont has an honor medal from 1950 (The Happy Day)and this one from 2002. Plus the full Caldecott for A Tree is Nice in 1957. Talk about a career!

This is the first winner he’s written/ illustrated and I love it. A simple family takes in a stray story with so much shown rather than told. Very touching and cute.

You can see the more classic illustration of A Tree is Nice in the drawings of the people but he also tweaks his like in a more cartoony way for the dog and the catcher. This book also contains some really lovely full page paintings – the family driving across the bridge at night is especially nice.

A really great book.

I consider Margaret Wise Brown to be a true master. You only really start to recognize that when you start noticing how many books she’s written: The Color Kittens, The Important Book, Little Fur Family, The Noisy Book, The Dead Bird, The Little Island and the one, two punch (illustrated by Clement Hurd) of Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny. Please someone explain to my why those books aren’t Caldecott winners. And these are just a few of well over 50 books. Imagine if she’d lived past 42!

I don’t feel this is one of her best books, but it’s still pretty good. Very soothing. A bit religious for me, but that’s my perspective and in 1943? Nicely done.

The copy I’m looking at is a beat up board book from the library that’s been less than skillfully re-taped so I don’t think I can give the best assessment of the pictures. They’re OK, kind of quirky colored pencil drawings. Not really my taste.

Very simple. Very sweet. Very bedtime and reassuring. A cozy book.

The art looks like scratchboard with yellow added. I really like that yellow. It’s used really well as the light but also meaningfully and surprisingly throughout the image. The key and the teddy’s tummy, but also someone’s laundry on the line…

My favorite image is the last one, with everyone curled up in their beds with a bedtime friend. It’s the least scary nighttime possible.

Tresselt has been honored 3 times (at least according to my quick scan)and this is his actual win.

When I googled him I came across a page that said, “With his poetic prose style, he created the “mood” picture book, which relied not on plot and character but on setting and description.” And I thought, yes! That’s what’s going on. Because in both of his books so far, they’re very cool but really very little happens. In this book, it’s going to snow, it snows, and then spring comes and various neighborhood types (and bunnies) react to it.

Very texty, very poetic, but the chum enjoyed it and wanted it repeatedly.

The pictures do absolutely nothing for me. They’re very much of the modern wave of illustration of their period – which is totally abandoned now.

Another great book from McCloskey. What can I say, the man’s a master. As always his illustrations are interesting and beautiful. Love the one where Sal’s dad has to row them all the way across the harbor.

A longer book, but it’s for older readers than Blueberries for Sal ,and you can tell because Sal is a big girl now with a wiggly tooth and everything! So many wonderful moments in this book and so true to the way kid’s minds actually work. I love the part where she walks along yelling to the animals about her tooth and wondering if they have teeth or get wiggly teeth too.

Interesting how the central struggle is really about the delights and the hardships of becoming a big girl. Talk about speaking to your audience!

And I love how she wishes for ice cream – just like the chum always does.

Stand by for sacrilege.

The more Seuss I read as an adult, the more I realize I don’t really love it. I mean, it’s fine. It’s fun to read aloud with the rhymes and tongue twisters and all but it’s pretty damn predictable, isn’t it?

I’ve found so many authors in this process I just adore, who seem to surprise me with each book , whether because the mood or style changes (like Gerald McDermott or Leo Lionni) or just because they seem to understand something so true and beautiful about the way a child’s mind words (like Margaret Wise Brown or Ruth Krauss). But Seuss is always the same and always showing off.

I like his easy readers best Hop on Pop which we also read this week was awesome and Green Eggs and Ham is really fun. But these long ones? Not so much. And this one suffers from some very dated and squirm-worthy racial stereotyping.

Hey! Missions! The swallows returning to San Capistrano! Why did no one read this to us in 4th grade during our mission unit? Oh wait, because it’s way too cute for 4th graders. Kids today….(Fume)

As with so many books from this period, a bit too long and/ or dry for the chum. But Politi did a great job taking a lot of data about the missions and the swallows and that whole saga and fusing it to a narrative about a boy and gardens. I loved how Juan makes his own garden and is rewarded by nesting swallows there. That so never happens.

Not much to say about the illustrations. Not the books strongest point. A bit too rough and suggestive or me – either try for more realism or go all the way and be stylized, I say. Halfway there just looks unskilled.

I don’t think this book is really well served by the full color / two color, printing method. When your book is celebrating spring and flowers and all, it’s kind of underwhelming to see it in shades of red and gray.

There are so many books of “poems through the year”, why is this one worthy of note? In my opinion, it’s the John Updike poems – not the art.

The art is pretty pedestrian, though nicely multicultural, which I didn’t expect in the Vermont-like setting. The best is the truly excellent August illustration for beach going, “And take off almost all their clothes” with the toddler who has ignored the almost and is naked on the beach with mommy reacting. Love those naked moments in kids books.

I can’t put my finger on what makes the poems so much better than the usual (at least not without the book in front of me, which I don’t have). I think it’s way Updike manages to get all of the elements of a month – the significant holiday, the weather and it’s effects on mood, and the changes in the natural world- wrapped together into something more evocative than its parts. So often these month books feel like a list or are just so predictable. February = Valentines. July = fireworks. September = school. I understand we’re trying to teach the patterns of the year to children but so boring. This book does everything you’d expect but somehow is also more and truer.

And that’s why it’s an award winner.

Awesome, right? Such a fun book about two boys, a week together, and how what kids want to do is so often not at all what adults think they’ll like.

We are officially in love with Marla Frazee here. After this book and the masterpiece Rollercoaster (a book the chum has read at least twice a day since we checked it out – shall probably buy it soon, I feel I need to search out all her stuff. Her style is much more cartoony here than in Rollercoaster- but that suits the kid vision of the story.

Snarky, very little boyish (without ever being horrid like No, David), and great fun.

It’s surprising how quickly some of these books drop into obscurity. I had to get this one from the Lake County library and I see from the paper card in the front (!!) it’s not checked out that often. Which is surprising because it’s really quite good.

The illustrations are black and white, I think charcoal, with a lot of interesting shading. Very beautiful. But when you’re looking for Native American retelling, the flashy imagery of Gerald McDermott or the Anansi snark of Eric Kimmel might just leap off the shelf more than this quiet gem.

The chum found the sacrifices that Mouse makes to complete his travels to the far-off land almost too scary. But I think that may make it a more powerful book. He gives up so much to get to his goal and does it in kindness. And then he’s rewarded at the end. Nice to have a story that’s actually worth discussing.