12-21-10: Pictures, Pages, and Ink

Paula Willey is a librarian at the Towson Public Library (look for the librarian with the pink hair).  She also reviews books for children and young adults on the blog Pink Me, and she speaks with Tom about the best books of the season for the 18 and under crowd.

Paula’s recommendations:

The best books to give as gifts to kids are the ones that they’ll return to again and again. Browsable anthologies, entertaining fact books, stunning engineered books like pop-up books and lift-the-flap books, and favorite fiction are all good candidates.

Each of the following sections is arranged in age order, with books for the youngest readers listed first.

Best Sellers

Here are some obvious ones – books that you’ll find on sale at the wholesale club as well as at the chain bookstores.  There’s a reason why they’re so popular. Loaded with tricky little gimmicks, they are as fun to play with as they are to read.

The Lift-the-Flap Shadow books (In the Town, At The Zoo, On The Farm, et cetera) by Roger Priddy. For ages 1 and up. Graphically appealing and developmentally appropriate.

Interactive Explorer Animal Kingdom – For about grades 1 and up, this spiral-bound book is full of facts, with an engineered feature–such as a mini-book, a transparent page, or a pull-tab–on every page.

Star Wars Millenium Falcon. If you’ve got a Star Wars fan on your list, that kid really wants this book. Sturdy cardboard pages feature cut-outs that take the reader through every level of the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. Reading level really doesn’t come into play here, and the book is strong enough to withstand rough handling by even the littlest Jedi younglings.

Alienology and Vampireology. The Ology series are oversize “nonfiction” books that always include little envelopes to open, notes to find, and puzzles to solve. They’re confusing for really little kids, but grades 3 and up just love them. If I had to generalize, I’d say Alienology is for boys and Vampireology is for girls.

Sports Illustrated Kids: All Access. Grown men have been known to become absorbed in this behind-the-scenes look at athletes, venues, and gear. The Mets clubhouse has a giant stash of candy and snacks, while the room behind the scoreboard wall at Fenway Park is inscribed with the signatures of athletes and celebrities. Middle school and up, but younger sports fans will snap it up too.

DC Superheroes – Is this giant pop-up book for the kids? Or for the grownups in their life? Both will enjoy seeing Superman leap off the page, and Wonder Woman’s invisible jet made out of clear plastic is awfully cool.

Robert Sabuda’s Beauty and the Beast – Robert Sabuda is the Michelangelo of pop-up. Almost every year he comes out with a collectible masterpiece with one large and multiple miniature pop-up features on every page. This gorgeous creature is no exception. It’s irresistible, but it has to be handled with care. Not only are the pop-ups fragile, the binding is weak. If you buy this for a kid, you’ll need to show her how to handle it and reassure her that when it rips, it’s not really her fault.

Lesser-known Winners

If you’re venturing beyond the warehouse stores, here are a few special titles for children that are a little bit off the beaten track.

Seasons by Blexbolex – Blexbolex is a French printmaker, and this big thick book, which strolls through the year one word at a time, has one of his modernist, impressionistic prints on every page. Starting with bud, swallow, seed, and shoot in spring and ending with firewood and chestnuts, it is simple and sophisticated at the same time.

Out of Sight by Pittau & Gervais is a supersized, superfun book full of flaps to lift and animals to discover. Tiny, simple pop-ups and fun facts reward readers ages 4 and up.

Beautiful Oops. Barney Saltzberg shows young artists that a rip, a spill, a smudge or a smear can be turned into something beautiful. The book itself is ripped, spilled-upon, bent, and small enough for the hands of artists grade 1 and up.

Life-size Aquarium by Teruyuki Komiya. Spectacular undersea creatures like tiny clown fish, an enormous walrus, and a Japanese spider crab as big as a basketball are photographed with brilliant clarity and accompanied by interesting facts that encourage children to look closer at the big photos. Great for teaching observation skills to young independent readers, but also just fun and beautiful.

Peter Kent’s City Across Time. From the Stone Age to the distant future, Kent’s super-detailed pen and ink drawings show a city in cross-section from deep underground to high in the sky. Like Where’s Waldo, kids will search for traces of what has come before on each successive page.

Do Not Open by John Farndon. Lots of kids go for almanacs and books of records. This book compiles weird facts and unexplained phenomena. Perfect for browsing, the writing is good, the illustration is hip and interesting, and the whole thing comes in its own jail-cell-like slipcase.

The Clock Without a Face by Scott Teplin, Mac Barnett & Eli Horowitz. This house-shaped board book can be enjoyed as a fun story, a challenging visual mystery, or even as an actual treasure hunt – the authors have buried twelve gold numbers across the USA, and the clues to finding them are all in the book.

The Book of Potentially Catastrophic Science: 50 Experiments for Daring Young Scientists. Take years off the life of the family pet by supplying your child with this book, the sequel to The Book of Totally Irresponsible Science. Projects like The Jell-O Earthquake are fun to read about and even more fun to do as kids learn about great discoveries in the history of science. Grades 5 and up.

Don’t confine yourself to the children section. Lots of adult non-fiction is loaded with pictures and sidebars just like kids books are, and the reading level isn’t that much higher. Find out what the kid is interested in and then match him or her up with something big and beautiful.

National Geographic’s Indian Nations of North America will be a lifelong resource to a kid fascinated by Native Americans.

I had to look a few times at Mapping the World: Stories of Geography before I was sure it wasn’t a kids book. And I can just imagine a kid paging through Lonely Planet The Travel Book on a rainy day and planning where she’s going to go when she grows up.

Magnificent color photos will inspire all kinds of kids in Smithsonian Natural History: The Ultimate Visual Guide to Everything on Earth. Discover the beauty of fungi and the spectacular ugliness of toads.

Anthologies and books of tales

Illustrator Jerry Pinkney’s edition of Aesop’s Fables is still the one that kids reach for when given a choice. The stories are each about a page or even less, and the art is realistic but full of personality. Read this aloud to ages 5 and up.

There’s a Princess in the Palace: Five Classic Tales, retold by Zoe Alley with pictures by R.W. Alley. This father-daughter team brings us a fun, oversized comic book style fairy tale book, with updated, peppy dialogue and cheeky mice commenting on the action.

Classic Horse Stories by Christina Darling compiles some of the nicest stories and poetry and surely the loveliest horse illustrations all in one book for a horse-loving kid.

American Tall Tales by Mary Pope Osborne is a very entertaining collection of stories about larger-than-life folk heroes like Pecos Bill and Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind.

The Arabian Nights by Wafa Tarnowska. Eight tales from the legendary story cycle, based on a 14th-century manuscript. Perhaps ages 10 and up.

The Complete Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault. Perrault was the author of Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Puss-In-Boots, and many less well-known tales. This 1993 edition includes these and more, with illustrations by Sally Holmes that are mysterious and realistic at the same time.

Activity books

Picture This and Photo Finish, both by Pascale Estellon, invite children to draw faces on vegetables, draw clothes on people, covers for books, hats on heads and heads under hats. Lots of fun for ages 5 and up.

The Peter Yarrow Songbook: Favorite Folk Songs comes with a CD of 12 songs performed by the author (Peter of Peter, Paul & Mary). Multiple generations can enjoy sharing songs like The Erie Canal, Cockles and Mussels, and Rock-a My Soul. Chord diagrams are provided too.

Little Monsters Cookbook – This cute cookbooks uses kind of a lot of prepared foods (refrigerated breadstick dough, pudding mix, etc.) but the recipes are at a consistent ability level, it’s well photographed, and it has a spiral binding, so it’s my pick for specialty cookbook this season. Could work for kids as young as first grade.

Betty Crocker’s Kids Cook! – Also spiral bound (why aren’t all cookbooks spiral bound?), this is my pick for nonspecialty kids cookbook. Fun, lively illustrations on every page. Grade 3 and up.

The National Geographic Classic Treasury of Childhood Wonders is both an anthology of poetry, songs, and very short stories; and a truly vast collection of linked activities. For example, instructions for making a shadow print accompany My Shadow by Robert Louis Stevenson and a painting of soccer players by Andrew Macara. A winner for ages 8 and up.

Box sets

For the kid who loves reading, these popular series are available as box sets this year:

Ivy & Bean’s Secret Treasure Box (Books 1-3) and Ivy and Bean Boxed Set 2: Great short sweet books for girls aged seven and up.

39 Clues. Travel the world with Dan and Amy Cahill as they solve their family’s mystery.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid Box of Books

Percy Jackson and the Olympians Hardcover Boxed Set.

Hunger Games Trilogy Boxset Katniss finds fame and romance when she volunteers to fight in a televised battle to the death.

The Chronicles of Vladimir Tod Boxed Set. Does high school bum him out? Vlad’s adventures will show him a little bright side – at least he’s not a teen vampire!

The Kate DiCamillo Collection. Contains Because of Winn-Dixie, The Tiger Rising, The Tale of Despereaux, and The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, all books that kids read over and over.

Also consider The Complete Little House Nine-Book Set, Candlewick’s Classic Christmas Collection, the E. B. White Box Set, or the bright and beautiful Roald Dahl 15 Book Box Set.

Magazines

At the library and in school, I hear sometimes from despairing parents whose kids just aren’t interested in books at all. Sometimes that’s a phase, sometimes that’s just the kid. Plenty of adults don’t read books either – my husband reads nothing but The Economist and Sports Illustrated, and most people think he’s reasonably intelligent anyway.

So for those kids, I always recommend magazines. Actually, I think every kid should have a subscription to a magazine. Whether it’s Sports Illustrated for Kids or Teen Vogue, magazines deliver fresh, colorful stories straight to the house, with the kid’s name right on the front. Magazines reinforce the idea that reading is a good way to learn more about things that interest you. They encourage browsing and improve information processing skills, and best of all, they don’t appear to be doing any of those things!

Babybug. Ages 6 months to 2 years. Rhymes, songs, stories, sturdy pages.

Ladybug. For ages 2 to 6.

Your Big Backyard. For kids too young for Ranger Rick, ages 3 to 6.

Highlights For Children.

Kids Discover. Ages 6-12.

National Geographic Kids. One of the best. For kids 6-12.

Boys Life. Boys 7 and up.

Ranger Rick. Nature, for kids 7 and up.

Discovery Girls. Girls aged 8 and up.

American Girl. Girls aged 8 and up.

Sports Illustrated KIDS. For sports fans aged 8-12.

Muse. Sponsored by Smithsonian, covers science and culture for kids 9-14.

Cricket. For kids 9-14, stories, poetry, recipes, puzzles, etc.

Odyssey. Science, for kids 10 and up.

Teen Vogue

New York Times Upfront (teen level)

Game Informer. This is an adult magazine, but for your teen gamers, it’s the best source of info.

MAD Magazine. Reading level debatable. Intellectual worth negligible. Indispensable for showing young people that stupid humor was not born on YouTube! No home should be without MAD.

Last but not least, here are some Christmas favorites old and new:

Rachel Isadora is from South Africa, and she often uses traditional African patterned cloth in her collage artwork. Her 12 Days of Christmas breathes new life into this old song by placing it an African setting – “five gold rings” are around the neck of a Maasai woman, “10 lords” are wearing traditional dance costumes from Mali, and the extremely peppy “12 drummers drumming” are jamming out on Nigerian drums.

Similarly, Ms. Isadora’s Christmas book from last year, The Night Before Christmas, populates the traditional poem by Clement C. Moore with a dreadlocked St. Nick whose big red coat is trimmed in zebra hide. This funky Santa pilots his sleigh around the world delivering dolls made of kente cloth and wirework toy cars.

The Nonna in Nonna Tell Me a Story is TV chef Lidia Bastianich, so this sweet little story about decorating for Christmas in Italy comes with a bonus – cookie recipes!

There is a very pretty cut-paper version of The Night Before Christmas by Niroot Puttapipat that could become an heirloom in any household, and a not-quite-so-pretty edition of A Christmas Carol illustrated by Brett Helquist that really captures the Dickensian spirit.

A more humorous – and nondenominational – holiday classic is Lemony Snicket’s The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming: A Christmas Story. Funny, informative, and with a happy ending, as all good Christmas stories do.