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Flora and the Penguin

Written and illustrated by Molly Idle
Published by Chronicle Books 2014
978-1-4521-2891-7
Age 4 to 8 (+) 32 pages
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“Flora is back and this time she partners with a penguin. Twirling, leaping, and gliding on skates and flippers, the duo mirror each other in an exuberant ice dance. But when Flora gives the penguin the cold shoulder, the pair must figure out a way to work together for uplifting results.”

Opening

As Flora ties her right skate, she notices something poke out of a hole in the ice. What could it be?

Review

Flora is back at the ice rink, getting ready to glide and twirl when she sees something odd in the hole across from where she sits lacing her skate. Flora extends her hand, offering it to Penguin. He accepts (I am assuming Penguin is a he, I really do not know). Flipper in hand, the pair glide in perfect harmony. Left foot glide to the right; turn and right foot glide to the left. In absolute harmony, Flora and Penguin take off and then LEAP into a perfect twirl.

Oh, NO! Penguin misses his landing, falling onto his rotund rear. Flora glides away . . . laughing. Penguin belly slides to her with a twinkle in his eye. This is not Flora and the Flamingo. The grace and style are present. The harmonious duet is there. The serious business of skating is not. Penguin brings the smiles and laughs out of Flora. He also spoils his partner, or, rather, he tries. Flora rejects Penguin’s gift. Sure, it is a small fish he has brought her; a snack Penguin chased below the ice—in synchronicity with Flora’s skating. Flora flips the fish over her head. Penguin looks mortified as his gift somehow lands into the hole in the ice and swims away.

The beautiful illustrations once again capture the elegant characters gliding, twirling, and leaping. At quick glance, one might believe this is the Caldecott Honor Book Flora and the Flamingo, only with a penguin. That person would be wrong, terribly wrong. In Flora and the Flamingo, Flora is the student learning from Flamingo, the teacher. In Flora and the Penguin, Flora is no longer the student, nor is she the teacher. She and Penguin are friends skating together and having fun. When Penguin misses his landing, no one turns away in admonition. No, Flora happily laughs and Penguin giggles as they join back together. These two are playmates.

Playmates have fights, as you are sure to remember. Flora turns away in a pout, checking on Penguin when he looks away. Penguin is also pouting in anger and keeping an eye on Flora. These two friends need to find their way back and Ms. Idle does this in grand style. A four-page grand spread. Flora and the Penguin is a gorgeous, wordless picture book that will wow anyone lucky enough to turn the pages. Some pages contain flip-up, -down, or –sideways, always changing the scene and promoting a smile.

Flora and the Penguin is an easy choice for anyone who loves ballet. Yet this gorgeous, should-win-lots-of-awards picture book will attract a wider audience. Like her throngs of admirers, I cannot wait for her next release, though I am secretly hoping for new characters in a new story. Whatever direction she takes, parents and young children will love the finished product. Ms. Idle has perfected the art of wordless storytelling.

FLORA AND THE PENGUIN. Text and illustrations copyright © 2014 by Molly Idle. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, CA.

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Buy Flora and the Penguin at Amazon—iTunes—B&N—Book Depository—Chronicle Books—your favorite bookstore.

Learn more about Flora and the Penguin HERE

Meet the author/illustrator, Molly Idle, at her website:  http://idleillustration.com/

Find more picture books at the Chronicle Books’ website:   http://www.chroniclebooks.com/

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Also by Molly Idle

Camp Rex

Tea Rex

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Copyright © 2014 by Sue Morris/Kid Lit Reviews

Another wee redraw of last year’s  “Mice Skates”

Skate on over here and check out my fellow HoHoDooDaers!

Announcing (last minute as is tradition) the beginning of HoHoDooDa 2013!

As nutty as November was, what with PiBoIdMo (thank you so much Tara Lazar!) and SkADaMo 2013, it was just what the doctor ordered as far as a shot of creative, mojo-inducing stress.

A couple of Decembers ago, to keep the momentum going, my fellow doodle pals and inspiring muses, Marion Eldridge, Laura Jacobson and I engaged in yet another month-long sketch-a-thon we dubbed HoHoDooDa, short for Holiday Doodle a Day (hmmm, not really that much shorter. Is it?) We did our best to create a holiday-themed doodle a day… or even every other day… or as often as humanly possible, throughout December.

What with the holidays and all, I admit it’s a little crazy and there may be some gnashing of teeth and tears shed, but overall, I’m sure it will be a blast and very rewarding, as it was last year. So, doin’ it again this year!

Just like SkADaMo, anyone who wants to join in is more than welcome! Regardless of what winter holiday you celebrate!

Rules for HoHoDooDa

“What are the rules for HoHoDooDa?” You may ask.

1. THERE ARE NO RULES! NO SIGN UP! NO REGISTRATION! NO GIVEAWAYS OR GUEST POSTERS!  No regulations, themes, daily words, Facebook pages or anything else resembling organization. Just lots of holiday doodling, commenting back and forth and hopefully lots of inspiration and craft honing!
HoHoDooDa Doodlers are scoff-laws and Mavricks! (Really, I’m just not that organized.) The only code we live by this month is Doodle! Doodle! Doodle! Doodle everyday from December 1 to December 31, or at least try to.
You may not Doodle every single day, but by golly you will have tried and you’ll have more doodles in your sketchbook at the end of December than you might have otherwise.
So, there’s that!

2. If you send me a link to your blog, (or wherever you are posting your HoHoDooDa doodles) I will keep a running list of all the participants and their links on my blog. This way we can all keep in touch and root each other on and enjoy the sugarplum fruits of each other’s doodle labors

If there are any broken links, bad links, I forgot anyone, misspelled anyone’s name or any other heinous act was performed, please let me know and I’ll do my best to correct it.

3. Smile, this is fun!

Doodle on my fellow HoHoDooDa Doodlers, (should there be any!)

Tigger Goes Ice Skating!

Sugar and Ice
By Kate Messner
Walker & Company (a division of Bloomsbury)
$16.99
ISBN: 978-0-8027-2081-8
Ages 9-12
On shelves December 9^th

They say to write what you know. We’ve all heard that line. It’s bounced about countless writing groups. But there’s an unspoken rule amongst children that’s as pervasive as it is harmful: Read what you know. If you’re a soccer fan, only read soccer books. If you like ballet, get a whole bunch of ballet books. Librarians, teachers, and parents can spend countless hours fighting against the sometimes innate understanding some children have acquired that dictates that they can’t read about anything outside of the realm of their own (limited) experience. This might be understandable if you were dealing with a writer that played by his or her own rules and failed to let child readers in on the fun, but it’s absolutely ridiculous when you’re dealing with a book like Kate Messner’s Sugar and Ice. Authors that commit to creating worlds that are outside the experience of your average everyday kid and yet are accessible enough for ALL children to enjoy are rare, but they’re out there. Sugar and Ice is out there. And you don’t have to be a fan of ice skating, Fibonacci, beekeeping, or sugar tapping to enjoy it (though it probably wouldn’t hurt if you were).

For Claire Boucher life is pretty simple. Practice skating on the local cow pond. Help out at the small ice skating rink when possible. And for fun, do a segment during the local competition’s Maple Festival. All that changes when Claire’s routine for fun catches the eye of big-time muckety muck trainer Andrei Groshev. Groshev has a deal for Claire. He’s offering her a scholarship to train with other students like herself for huge ice skating competitions. In return, Claire will have to sacrifice the life she’s always known. Not a natural competitor, Claire accepts then almost immediately wonders what she’s gotten herself into. Most of the kids are nice, but some are jealous of her talent. She hardly has time to do schoolwork as well as training, and worst of all someone is sabotaging her equipment and confidence. In the end, Claire needs to determine if she’s got what it takes to be a serious contender, or if she’s just gonna go back to her cow pond and forget any of this ever happened.

Let’s go back to what I was saying earlier about authors who commit to distinct, one-of-a-kind worlds. In the case of this particular book, Ms. Messner has brought the world of competitive ice skating to real and vibrant life. I think a lot of kids have shared in the experience of watching ice skaters during the Olympics leap, and often fall, in their attempts to nab the gold. There’s a very real drama there. But even if you’re dealing with a child who has only the haziest understand of ice skating, Claire’s life is going to ring true for them. That’s because Ms. Messner commits to the bit. She’s going to use emotional situations that everyone can relate to and then work in real facts about skating in the gaps. The result is that even though I don’t know a triple lutz from a double axel, I can follow this story. The result is that the reader gets the same experience they would have if they read something like Jane Smiley’s The Georges and the Jewels about horse training. You don’t have to know, or even be interested in, the material

www.Kitgrady.com
Kit Grady Creations

I travel to New York City just enough each year for the city to be directionally familiar and situationally unexpected. So that I was not expecting, on our wind-whipped day, to find Christmas shops in Bryant Park behind the public library, nor an imported rink with a snow-top finish where these skater congregated. I'd have put on a pair of skates had I been alone, for it was early in the New York day and there was room for one more glider. But I took photographs instead—spectating in this case being nearly as good.

These are Christmas cards I illustrated for Christian Collection this year.


May God bless you as you seek the true reason for celebrating Christmas - that little baby born in a manger over 2000 years ago!

Merry Christmas,
Kristi Valiant
www.kristivaliant.com

Yesterday in my travels I came upon this boy on ice—sweeping a hockey stick before him, training a puck. The pond ice was blue, and beneath it swam herds of orange koy, slides of sunset colors going by. I walked the circumference of the pond, then walked out onto the ice, where I could imagine myself pushing off and gaining speed. Throwing myself open to the wind, a red scarf trailing behind.

Perhaps because we here on the east coast have had a bit of a cold spell lately. Perhaps because the heating system in our old house went down a few months ago (and cannot be repaired til summer, leaving us with a patchwork of space heaters, leaving me endlessly bone-chilled, cold pounded, fractured), I keep thinking about my early days on ice skating rinks.

This was after I'd taught myself to skate on Boston ponds. After I'd told my parents that I wanted nothing more than blades and ice beneath my feet, that I might die if I didn't have this, that I might not grow up to be me. After Robyn Rock, the skating sensation of the Wilmington, DE, rink, came out one day during a public skate session (this being a few months post-Boston) and taught me to waltz jump for real, to rightly spin. This was after that, when I was skating early morning, late afternoon, most every day. It's those days that I've been thinking about lately.

Days when the cold was something I sought, I craved, when I craved that music playing. I wanted to float—forever, always. I wanted to leap and never land.

There are few photographs of me as a child. There are just a handful of me on skates. I have in my possession two. It seems right that they are imprecise, blurred through.

The cold snap has me thinking of ice and blades, of first waltz jumps on frozen Boston ponds, and of the Schuylkill River, years ago, when skating clubs rose up along the banks and men pushed their ladies about on bladed chairs. (Ah, gallantry, where has it gone?)

But what does it feel like to be skated upon? I wondered about that as I wrote Flow, the river's autobiography. I thought it might go something like this:

Imagine taking a needle to the point of blood upon your palm. Imagine drawing that needle around and around, leaning in on it, forcing an edge, tearing at the creases and the lifelines, the ridges and slightest hills that forecast your happiness. Imagine the skin giving way.


That's skating.

(with thanks to The Library Company of Philadelphia for use of this iconic Boathouse Row image)