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Big City Otto: Elephants Never Forget
By Bill Slavin
With Esperança Melo
Kids Can Press
ISBN: 978-1-55453-476-0
Ages 8-11
On shelves now

Boy, The Man With the Yellow Hat just lost all credibility, didn’t he? Time was that Curious George snatcher could nab the jungle beast of his choice, slap his hands together, and call it a day. These days, though, readers don’t take too kindly to fellows who go about grabbing the next spare primate they set their sights on. Various children’s authors have dealt with him one way or another (Furious George Goes Bananas by Michael Rex comes most immediately to mind). Big City Otto takes the idea from an entirely different bent. What if George left a friend behind? And what if that friend was an elephant? The result is something along the lines of Babar by way of Mowgli setting off on a mission to rescue Curious George. With a parrot sidekick. Can’t believe I almost forgot the parrot sidekick.

Otto the elephant is depressed. No two ways about it. You’d be pretty depressed too, mind you, if your best buddy and practically step-brother, Georgie, was up and kidnapped by some crazed man with a wooden nose and a sack. After sighing and crying over his friend’s disappearance, Crackers the parrot convinces Otto participate in a kind of a crazy scheme. Clearly Georgie was kidnapped and taken to America so all they’ll have to do is go to the U.S., find him, and rescue him. Trouble is, it’s not that simple. There’s the getting there from Africa part (extra large cargo, anyone?), finding friendly folks who can help out, interviewing zoo animals, and more. But when Otto and Crackers fall in with a pack of crocodiles with ulterior motives, locating one little monkey is the least of their problems.

In his little bio attached to this book author/illustrator Bill Slavin says he is in “Millbrook, Ontario, surrounded by his well worn Asterix collection.” The Asterix influence is indeed felt in this work. Not so much the artistic style, mind you, but definitely the pace. Never lagging, always upbeat, “Otto” makes for a quick read. And really, it was the art that attracted me to this book in the first place. Slavin’s style manages to encompass all kinds of settings and characters with ease. It can’t be simple to try to replicate the big city’s feel. You’d end up drawing sheer amounts of people more than anything else. But Slavin paces himself, and the reader could be forgiven for concentrating primarily on Otto anyway. He’s a big lovable lummox. One that’s hard to look away from.

Of course the time period is a bit of a mystery. As I see it, there are two possible reasons why this book appears to be set in 1993. Reason #1: Slavin originally wrote the book in that year and saw little reason to update it to the current day. Reason #2: He just real

From Then to Now: A Short History of the World
By Christopher Moore
Illustrated by Andrej Krystoforski
Tundra Books
$25.95
ISBN: 978-0-88776-5407
Ages 9 and up
On shelves now.

I have nothing but respect for contemporary historians. A few of them, let us be honest, are rock stars. They have to take something as strange and ephemeral as knowledge (such as it stands) about the past and make it into something relevant and interesting and coherent. These days historians also need to make sure they don’t follow in the footsteps of their forefathers and just focus everything on white people. I grant that it was easier to write history when it came down to just a single ethnicity, but talk about restrictive! Then there are the historians for children. They have to not only do all the aforementioned steps, but make history as accurate and simple, without being simplistic, as possible. It would be difficult enough to do all of this if your book was about a person or a country. Now imagine the challenge that comes from writing about the entire history of humankind in a scant 188 pages. With pictures, no less. Leave it up to the Canadians to get it right. Toronto historian Christopher Moore does his best to render an entire world in a single book without putting the whippersnapper young readers to sleep. That he manages it has got to be some kind of miracle right there.

As Moore says in his Preface, “When does a history of the world – even a short history of the world – start? This history starts with people.” So it is that we are plunged into the past. From rice farmers in China to The Great Pyramid of Giza. From Cleopatra to Martin Luther. Though he can only provide the barest of overviews, Moore takes care to give history a kind of structure, allowing student readers the chance to find the aspects that interest them the most for future study on their own. The book includes an explanation of BCE and CE vs. BC and AD in an Author’s Note, as well as an Index and a map on the endpapers of places named in the text. Very oddly, no Bibliography appears here. Strange indeed.

The endpapers of this book, displaying a map with highlighted locations, pretty much give you a blunt encapsulation of where Moore’s attention is going to focus in this text. You can sort of tell that the author is a Canadian right off the bat since L’Anse aux Meadows and Ramah Bay make the cut. The map identifies places that will come up in the text. Folks will undoubtedly object to the areas of the world that seemingly do not warrant a mention, but don’t be fooled. Just because a major metropolitan area in Australia doesn’t appear on the map that doesn’t mean that it has been excised from Moore’s history. A cursory examination of the Index yields at least 18 pages where the lands, and the Aborigines, are mentioned.

As for the text itself, Moore has been exceedingly careful. He starts off with the hominids of Africa, gives an overview of how they spread, launches into the Ice Age, goes into the whole hunter/gatherer society thing, and next thing you know you’re in the next chapter, “Learning to Farm”. He doesn’t mince words, this guy. As you read, you realize that Moore’s focus

My Name Is Elizabeth
By Annika Dunklee
Illustrated by Matthew Forsythe
Kids Can Press
$14.95
ISBN: 978-1-55453-560-6
Ages 4-8
On shelves September 1, 2011

The human capacity to garble a first name, even a simple or common one, is without limit. I should know. My name is Elizabeth. My preferred nickname is “Betsy”, which is not intuitive. Generally speaking, one should never assume what another person’s nickname is. In my day I have shouldered countless calls of “Liz”, more than one “Betty”, and the occasional (and unforgivable) “Eliza”. Still, my heart goes out to kids with fresh and original names that get mangled in the garbled mouths of well-meaning adults. For them, the name “Elizabeth” may seem simple in comparison. Yet as My Name Is Elizabeth! makes clear from the get-go, there is no name so simple that someone can’t butcher it in some manner.

Elizabeth loves her name. Who wouldn’t? It has a lot of advantages, like length and how it sounds when you work the syllables out of your mouth. The downside? Everyone just gives you whatever nickname they think suits you. If it’s not Lizzy then it’s Beth. If it’s not Liz then it’s something “Not. Even. Close.” like Betsy. At last Elizabeth can take it no longer. To the general world she declares her full name (“Elizabeth Alfreda Roxanne Carmelita Bluebell Jones”) or Elizabeth if you like. Finally, everyone gets it right. Even her little brother (though she might bend the rules a bit for his attempted “Wizabef”).

One has to assume that any author with the first name “Annika” would know from whence she speaks with a book like this. Kids don’t have much to call their own when they’re young. Their clothes and toys are purchased by their parents and can be changed and taken away at any moment. Their names, however, are their own. Some of them realize early on that these names have power, and that they themselves have power over those names. They can insist that they be called one thing or another. They cannot make anyone actually obey these requests, but they can try, doggone it. A lot of kids fantasize about changing their names, but Elizabeth embraces her name. Her beef with nicknames wins you over because there is something inherently jarring about being given the wrong label. We are inclined to become our names, even when we don’t want to.

This story contains a tiny cry for independence by a character that is insistent without being bratty. In the end, Elizabeth proves to be a grand role model for those kids. She’s precocious without being insufferable (a rare trait in a picture book heroine). I like the lesson she teaches kids here too. It’s easy to let the world make assumptions about you and walk all over you. And it’s particularly hard to stand up to people when they are wrong but well meaning. You might be inclined to let their mistakes go and not raise a fuss, but when you claim your own name you claim how the world sees you. This book highlights a small battle that any kid can relate to.

The two-color picture book is not unheard of these days but it is less common that it was back in th