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

The final act in McCloskey’s Maine stories. The girls could be Sal and her sister, much older now.

Some children’s books seem only to be peripherally for children – this is one of them. It’s a picture book, it features children and children can enjoy it on many levels, but it’s really such an adult book. The language is so poetic and the emotional quality is so adult – that longing for the magic of nature and childhood.

This book is a freakin’ masterpiece. So lovely. Such poetry. The love of place makes you want to cry. But for a four-year-old… He was interested throughout and had questions, but his appreciation of the bittersweet joys of longing are minimal.

Surprise! It’s Margaret Wise Brown writing under a pseudonym.

A sweet story about a boy shepherd and a black lamb with a daring night time rescue which is exciting but only minimally scary.

Not my favorite of her collaborations with Weisgard. A bit too roughly illustrated and a bit too long in some descriptions. I was really struck by the use of color (or lack of) in the night time illustrations. It’s a strong choice that I think many illustrators might have shied away from.

I found the dialect of this story to be a problem. In my opinion, when you’re bringing a different way of life to children, you want to make it relatable in some way. The dialect in this book was such that it started to make the poetry of the images get a bit lost in the irregularity of the verb forms. And also, I’m reading it to a 4 year old. I don’t want his reaction to an interesting peek into the work of migrant workers to be filtered through, these people aren’t talking right. So I standardized the verbs.

A lot of the kind of questions an older child might have had, about why this small girl is working the field all day and so on, didn’t come up. But I did relate it to our local migrant workers, the long days and the hard work. Some really beautiful images in the text especially the cotton flower blooming out of season.

I’m not a huge fan of impressionistic illustrations, but that style was really used well here – especially in the early morning pictures with the fog and in the cotton fields. Pretty.

I’ve mentioned this phenomenon before. Sometimes you just pick up a book and the illustrations are so dated, the period of it’s publication just screams at you. I don’t mean dated in a derogatory way either, I love a lot of these books, but you’d never think say, Hide and Seek Fog was from the 1980’s or Knuffle Bunny was from the 1950’s. They look of their time.

And so to Drummer Hoff which screams late 60’s from two aisles away. The colors! The crazy stain-glass like divisions of objects. The crazy last “Make Love Not War” -esque image of the cannon covered with flowers and birds. The colors! Oh the colors!!!!!! It’s, uh, bright.

The chum liked it a lot but that’s pretty much because he’s 4 years old and it’s about a cannon. It’s very simple and unsubstantial. And so very very of the late 1960’s. Flashback!

I’d seen this book around forever but had never actually read it. It was better than I expected and quite funny – electric blankets indeed.

The art is simple but has a personal style to it that elevates it about the basic cartoonishness it gives of at first glance. The way she uses the watercolors for texture is a lot of that, I think. The unevenness of the color gives it a more adult feeling than an even wash would. There’s also some really interesting shadow details.

Good book, worthy of several rereadings.

I love this book but I have yet to find a child who agrees with me. Maybe a 9-year old? It’s a fascinating post-modern picture book with it’s intertwining stories and it’s overlapping time structure and so on but the chum found it a difficult combination of too advanced and boring.

I love how Macaulay makes the art styles very different for each story. The water colored train story couldn’t be more of a contrast to the very blocky abstraction of the cow and robber story, for example. And so when characters or ideas cross narratives, they look so different that kids don’t even recognize the crossover right away.

Such an interesting book.

A classic fairy tale with many classic elements: the third brother protagonist, the many helpful wanderers who only want generosity in order to befriend you and save the day later, the King who tests the poor suitor… I’ve heard this story before, though I didn’t remember it being specifically Russian. Good story, very exciting and funny. The chum was especially taken with the man who can drink a whole lake.

For me, there’s a lack of detail in the pictures. The faces are just a bit undefined, the landscapes a bit too fuzzy. Also it has the use of color that says ‘60s – look! We have so much color available! But perhaps not the best reproduction quality.

Better story than illustrations but a big hit at our house – worthy of spontaneous dramatic interpretation

The chum and I both agreed that this book was “not our best”. A fable-y tale adapted from The Canterbury Tales about flattery. The language was really difficult and the concept of flattery is a bit abstract as well. But even without that, not really a great story, in my opinion.

Not bowled over by the illustrations either. Mt favorite part is the use of small detailed lines as texture – in the grass, on the backs of the pigs, and there’s a lovely picture that’s almost all black and white with really nice lines in the beehives and pops of color on the tree.

More interesting than enjoyable.

OK. What is wrong with the characters in this book? Seriously. The two main dogs look dog-like – shaggy and normal (until after the haircuts anyway). But what is wrong with everyone else? The goat? The barber? The bigger dog??? It’s like a modern art nightmare! The horror! And they don’t make sense either, ”Hair that is neat is better than meat.” Hmm.

Yes, everyone’s so self-centered that they can’t help the dogs, just as the dogs are so self-centered they can’t share, but really! And I guess the best way to solve the problem was with violence….. Darn 1950’s with their un-pc notions.

So what I’m saying is odd book. Not bad, just odd. And it’s written and illustrated by Will and Nicolas. Don’t those people need another name?

She is funny! Or possibly mentally ill – perhaps a bit overly obsessed with her dumpling? Anyway, tee hee hee! A good story with non-threatening and quite pudgy oni.

Two things struck me about the art in this book. The first is the simple line drawings that show events in the world above while the woman is underground. It’s an interesting way to show the remoteness of the other world, and then, once she’s back up again, the underground world is in the line drawing now. The second is the mottled drip texture used for the underground world, especially strikingly on the Jizo statues. It evokes age and wetness really strongly.

A very fun book