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Flora and the Flamingo
By Molly Idle
Chronicle Books
$16.99
ISBN: 978-1-4521-1006-6
Ages 3-7
On shelves February 3rd

Did you know that flamingos are pink because of their diet of plankton? Did you know that the flamingo is the national bird of the Bahamas? And did you know that when it comes to a pas de chat or a particularly fine jetée, no bird exceeds the flamingo in terms of balletic prowess? No? Then you’re clearly not reading the right literature these days. Now, before you get to thinking too hard about it, let me assure you that when I discuss a book like Flora and the Flamingo I should right off the bat say that this is NOT a book about a bird that wants to be a ballerina and must overcomes obstacles to achieve that goal. That is, without a doubt, the most common storyline in ballet picture books today. I would not review such a book as that. No, Flora and the Flamingo is notable because it is a perfect amalgamation of wordless storytelling, likable (or at least understandable) characters, and an artistic sensibility that will make you forget its unique formatting and remind you only of the classic picture book days of yore. So forget what flamingos eat. Are you getting enough flamingo picture books in YOUR diet? If not, time to start.

A single flamingo lands and perches on one leg beneath the falling pink blossoms. It does not notice the single flippered foot that appears behind it nor, at first, the bathing suited little girl that mimics his stance. But when he starts to stretch (or is he dancing?) he can’t help but see how she tries to imitate him, wing for wing. In a moment of cussidness he bleats at her, causing her to tumble head over heel into the water. Chastened, the flamingo offers a wing and the two embark on a fantastic dance, culminating in a joyous leap into the water and an elegant bow and curtsey.

Idle has the mark of the animator all over her. It’s a style of drawing you’ll find in the works of folks like Tony Fucile or Carter Goodrich. You can recognize an animator pretty easily right from the start. They tend to have very expressive protagonists. Take Flora, for example. Though at first she attempts to keep her face relatively placid, as the book goes on, a variety of emotions flit across her punim. From a miserable (mouthless) hurt glare to a skeptical raised eyebrow, to gentle trust, and, finally, pure pleasure. The white background sort of clinches it. Kirkus, in their review, said that there is a “courageous use of white space” in this book, and I have to agree. Yet for all that she has an animator’s heart, Idle avoids the pitfalls that have felled many from her field that have come before her. I’m talking about storyboarding. The laziest kind of picture book is the kind that feels like it began life as a serious of quick sketches tacked up on a wall somewhere. Storyboarding has its place in the world, but it is not an effective way to map out a picture book. There has to be a flow and a relationship between the pages. You have to know that by turning one you’re advancing the story right there. Idle achieves that feeling, and the reward is a tale that is as emotional as it is visual.

Idle does something particularly striking with the book that many an early 21st century reader might notice. Flora is certainly an everygirl, and in no way is that more evident than her weight. I am sorry to report that in the children’s book world, if a character is plus sized or larger than average, that will usually be the sole focus of their tale. The everyday adventures of kids that don’t look like walking popsicle sticks are nigh unto impossible to find sometimes. The nice thing about this book is that unless you want to interpret it as an exercise book (don’t) it isn’t about Flora’s pear-shaped body. Now if one were feeling somewhat cynical they might suspect that Idle is using her heroine’s weight to make her comical. I don’t think that’s really the case. Certainly the contrast between her and the flamingo is set off by their different appearances (more on that soon), but you could also argue that by giving her heroine a little more meat on her bones, Idle makes Flora easier to identify with. There are lots of overweight kids in America right now. Seems to me it shouldn’t be too hard to give them a happy dancing kid hero. Remember the “No Rain” by Blind Melon music video? It’s like that.

The unspoken (ha ha – there are no words in this book) irony here is the fact that flamingos are not usually considered unusually graceful birds. There’s a skinny gawkiness about them, and Idle makes use of that gawkiness to contrast her feathered hero with the very different awkwardness of the girl. Where he is all knobby knees and thin curled neck, she is circles and smiles. His elegant pink feet bear nothing in common with her ginormous brown flippers. This dichotomy is the striking difference that gives the book its visual kick in the pants. The white background and pink apple blossom-like flowers that frame the edges of the pages are perfectly suited to focus your attention on the bird and the girl. The flaps are just the icing on the cake.

I probably should have mentioned it before, but Flora and the Flamingo is actually a lift-the-flap picture book. If you want a fun exercise in clever book design, read just the pages with the flaps. You’ll see that at first Flora’s flap and the flamingo’s are on opposite pages with the flamingo directly in the center of his page and Flora’s flap slightly closer to the flamingo’s page. Skip ahead and you’ll see that Flora has traversed the gutter (the area found between pages) and suddenly her flap is touching the flamingo’s (no wonder he gets tetchy!). After he hurts her feelings the flaps are as far from one another as they can be. The flamingo makes good and for the first time the two characters share a single, large flap. They dance and it all builds up to a gatefold in the book that can be opened to reveal the two cannonballing happily into the water. Beautifully done.

I could get a lot of good out of this book with kids, I can see it now. First up, it would pair amusingly with another make-a-flamingo-your-buddy book, You WILL Be My Friend! by Peter Brown. As a ballet book, this title is also rather excellent. You can actually name the steps from time to time. I suppose if you absolutely had to you could even argue for this as an exercise book, but that’s pushing it. At its heart, Flora and the Flamingo is just an unassuming little story about making a friend. There’s nothing very complicated about that idea. It’s just all in how you present it, baby. Consider this one book that’s not afraid to let clever (yet essentially simple) design and good art do the heavy lifting.

On shelves March 1st.

Source: Final copy sent from publisher for review.

Like This? Then Try:

• You WILL Be My Friend by Peter Brown

• Ballerina Swan by Allegra Kent, illustrated by Emily Arnold McCully

• Color Dance by Ann Jonas

Professional Reviews:

• A star from Publishers Weekly
• Kirkus

Misc:

• Look inside the book yourself!

Videos:

Lest you doubt me when I proclaim Idle’s Dreamworks cred . . .

Now see the flaps in action!

The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdős
By Deborah Heiligman
Illustrated by LeUyen Pham
Roaring Brook (an imprint of Macmillan)
ISBN: 978-1-59643-307-6
Ages 6 and up
On shelves June 25th

Make a beeline for your local library’s children’s biography section and learn firsthand the shocking truth about picture book bios of mathematical geniuses. Apparently there was only one and his name was Einstein. End of story. The world as we know it is not overflowing with picture book encapsulations of the lives of Sir Isaac Newton or Archimedes (though admittedly you could probably drum up a Leonardo da Vinci book or two if you were keen to try). But when it comes to folks alive in the 20th century, Einstein is the beginning and the end of the story. You might be so foolish as to think there was a good reason for that fact. Maybe all the other mathematicians were dull. I mean, Einstein was a pretty interesting fella, what with his world-shattering theories and crazed mane. And true, the wild-haired physicist was fascinating in his own right, but if we’re talking out-and-out interesting people, few can compare with the patron saint of contemporary mathematics, Paul Erdős. Prior to reading this book I would have doubted a person could conceivably make an engaging biography chock full to overflowing with mathematical concepts. Now I can only stare in amazement at a story that could conceivably make a kid wonder about how neat everything from Euler’s map of Konigsburg to the Szekeres Snark is. This is one bio you do NOT want to miss. A stunner from start to finish.

For you see, there once was a boy who loved math. His name was Paul and he lived in Budapest, Hungary in 1913. As a child, Paul adored numbers, and theorems, and patterns, and tricky ideas like prime numbers. As he got older he grew to be the kind of guy who wanted to do math all the time! Paul was a great guy and a genius and folks loved having him over, but he was utterly incapable of taking care of himself. Fortunately, he didn’t have to. Folks would take care of Paul and in exchange he would bring mathematicians together. The result of these meetings was great strides in number theory, combinatorics, the probabilistic method, set theory, and more! Until the end of this days (when he died in a math meeting) Paul loved what he did and he loved the people he worked with. “Numbers and people were his best friends. Paul Erdős had no problem with that.”

There are two kinds of picture book biographies in this world. The first attempts to select just a single moment or personality quirk from a person’s life, letting it stand in as an example of the whole. Good examples of this kind of book might include Me…Jane by Patrick McDonnell about the childhood of Jane Goodall or Lincoln Tells a Joke: How Laughter Saved the President And the Country by Kathleen Krull. It’s hard to pinpoint the perfect way to convey any subject, but it can sometimes be even harder to tell an entire life in the span of a mere 40 pages or so. Still, that tends to be the second and more common kind of picture book biography out there. Generally speaking they don’t tend to be terribly interesting. Just a series of rote facts, incapable of making it clear to a kind why a person mattered aside from the standard “because I said so” defense. The Boy Who Loved Math is different because it really takes the nature of biography seriously. If the purpose of a bio is to make it clear that a person was important, how important was a guy who loved math puzzles? Well, consider what the story can do. In a scant number of pages author Deborah Heiligman gives us an entire life synthesized down to just a couple key moments, giving the man’s life form and function and purpose, all while remaining lighthearted and fun to read. Who does that?

Did you know that there are kids out there who like math? I mean, reeeeeeally like math? The kinds that beg their parents for math problems to solve? They exist (heck, Ms. Heiligman gave birth to one) and for those kids this book will come like a present from on high. Because not only does the author highlight a fellow who took his passion for numbers and turned it into a fulfilling and fun life, but thanks to illustrator LeUyen Pham the illustrations are overflowing with math equations and puzzles and problems, just waiting to be interpreted and dissected. I have followed the career of Ms. Pham for many years. There is no book that she touches that she does not improve with her unique style. Whether it’s zeroing in on a child’s neuroses in Alvin Ho or bringing lush life to a work of poetry as in A Stick Is an Excellent Thing, Pham’s art can run the gamut from perfect interstitial pen-and-inks to lush watercolor paints. I say that, but I have never, but ever, seen anything like what she’s done in The Boy Who Loved Math.

It would not be overstating the matter to call this book Pham’s masterpiece. The common story behind its creation is that there was some difficulty finding the perfect artist for it because whosoever put pen to paper here would have to be comfortable on some level with incorporating math into the art. Many is the artist who would shy away from that demand. Not Ms. Pham. She takes to the medium like a duck to water, seemingly effortlessly weaving equations, charts, diagrams, numbers, and theorems into pictures that also have to complement the story, feature the faces of real people, capture a sense of time (often through clothing) and place (often through architecture), and hardest of all, be fun to look at.

But that’s just for starters. The final product is MUCH more complex. I’m not entirely certain what the medium is at work here but if I had to guess I’d go with watercolors. Whatever it is, Pham’s design on each page layout is extraordinary. Sometimes she’ll do a full page, border to border, chock full of illustrations of a single moment. That might pair with a page of interstitial scenes, giving a feel to Paul’s life. Or consider the page where you see a group of diners at a restaurant, their worlds carefully separated into dotted squares (a hat tip to one of Paul’s puzzles) while Paul sits in his very own dotted pentagon. It’s these little touches that make it clear that Paul isn’t like other folks. All this culminates in Pham’s remarkable Erdős number graph, where she outdoes herself showing how Paul intersected with the great mathematicians of the day. Absolutely stunning.

Both Heiligman and Pham take a great deal of care to tell this tale as honestly as possible. The extensive “Note From the Author” and “Note From the Illustrator” sections in the back are an eye-opening glimpse into what it takes to present a person honestly to a child audience. In Pham’s notes she concedes when she had to illustrate without a guide at hand. For example, Paul’s babysitter (“the dreaded Faulein”) had to be conjured from scratch. She is the rare exception, however. Almost every face in this book is a real person, and it’s remarkable to look and see Pham’s page by page notes on who each one is.

Heiligman’s author’s note speaks less to what she included and more to what she had to leave out. She doesn’t mention the fact that Paul was addicted to amphetamines and honestly that sort of detail wouldn’t have served the story much at all. Similarly I had no problem with Paul’s father’s absence. Heiligman mentions in her note what the man went through and why his absences would make Paul’s mother the “central person in his life emotionally”. The book never denies his existence, it just focuses on Paul’s mother as a guiding force that was perhaps in some way responsible for the man’s more quirky qualities. The only part of the book that I would have changed wasn’t what Heiligman left out but what she put in. At one point the story is in the midst of telling some of Paul’s more peculiar acts as a guest (stabbing tomato juice cartons with knives, waking friends up at 4 a.m. to talk math, etc.). Then, out of the blue, we see a very brief mention of Paul getting caught by the police when he tried to look at a radio tower. That section is almost immediately forgotten when the text jumps back to Paul and his hosts, asking why they put up with his oddities. I can see why placing Paul in the midst of the Red Scare puts the tale into context, but I might argue that there’s no real reason to include it. Though the Note for the Author at the end mentions that because of this act he wasn’t allowed back in the States for a decade, it doesn’t have a real bearing on the thrust of the book. As they say in the biz, it comes right out.

I have mentioned that this book is a boon for the math-lovers of the world, but what about the kids who couldn’t care diddly over squat about mathy malarkey? Well, as far as I’m concerned the whole reason this book works is because it’s fun. A little bit silly too, come to that. Even if a kid couldn’t care less about prime numbers, there’s interest to be had in watching someone else get excited about them. We don’t read biographies of people exactly like ourselves all the time, because what would be the point of that? Part of the reason biographies even exist is to grant us glimpses into the lives of the folks we would otherwise never have the chance to meet. Your kid may never become a mathematician, but with the book they can at least hang out with one.

One problem teachers have when they teach math is that they cannot come up with a way to make it clear that for some people mathematics is a game. A wonderful game full of surprises and puzzles and queries. What The Boy Who Loved Math does so well is to not only show how much fun math can be on your own, it makes it clear that the contribution Paul Erdős gave to the world above and beyond his own genius was that he encouraged people to work together to solve their problems. Heiligman’s biography isn’t simply the rote facts about a man’s life. It places that life in context, gives meaning to what he did, and makes it clear that above and beyond his eccentricities (which admittedly make for wonderful picture book bio fare) this was a guy who made the world a better place through mathematics. What’s more, he lived his life exactly the way he wanted to. How many of us can say as much? So applause for Heiligman and Pham for not only presenting a little known life for all the world to see, but for giving that life such a magnificent package as this book. A must purchase.

On shelves June 25th

Source: Advanced readers galley sent from publisher for review.

Like This? Then Try:

• On a Beam of Light: The Story of Albert Einstein by Jennifer Berne, illustrated by Vladimir Radunsky

• Play, Mozart, Play by Peter Sis

• Me . . . Jane by Patrick McDonnell

• Odd Boy Out: Young Albert Einstein by Don Brown

Misc:

• Read what Ms. Heiligman had to say about the book on a recent NYPL panel Ethics in Nonfiction for Kids.

Hokey Pokey
By Jerry Spinelli
Alfred A. Knopf (an imprint of Random House)
$15.99
ISBN: 978-0-375-83198-0
Ages 9-12
On shelves now

Not a Jerry Spinelli fan over here. Nope. Some authors you love, some authors you loathe, and some you feel zip, zero, zilch feelings towards whatsoever. That was me and the Spinelli man. Maniac Magee? Nice enough book that did nothing for me. Stargirl? Certainly well written but not my cup of tea. Pull out names like Wringer or Milkweed or Loser and watch as my eyes oh-so-faintly glaze over as I think of what I’ll be cooking dinner tonight or what television shows are clogging up the old DVR. So mine was probably the ideal state in which to encounter a book like Hokey Pokey. It wasn’t that my expectations were low, necessarily. Enough smart folks in the field had been touting and hooting the name of this book ad nauseam to make me ad nauseous. But while I knew this was a high-caliber Spinelli project I probably just thought it would mean reading something like Maniac Magee 2: The Mageeing or something along those lines. I didn’t expect to find a book that does everything Peter Pan is reputed to do, but without the creepy factor. I didn’t expect to get swept up in the metaphor/allegory/what-the-heck-is-this-thing? that is Hokey Pokey itself. So it is that I stand before you with this book in my hand and admit with a little trepidation that it finally happened. I’m a Jerry Spinelli fan. And the reason for it is one of the strongest works of children’s fiction I have ever had the sheer joy to encounter.

It should be just another day in Hokey Pokey. For Jack, it’s his last. Somewhere, deep inside of himself, he knows it. And not just because his beloved bike Scramjet, is now in the possession of his number one most hated rival, the loathed girl Jubilee. No, it’s more than that. When his friends start noticing that the tattoo on his belly, the one on every kid in Hokey Pokey, is starting to fade away, he knows his time is up. Welcome to Hokey Pokey. A wonderland of a place where a kid gets to be a kid for as long as they like, every day. It’s the only place Jack has ever known and now he’s got to go.

Step One: Establish your world and separate it from Neverland. If this book is one great big allegory for childhood (Publishers Weekly essentially accused the book of being all a dream, which is the dullest interpretation of the story I can think of) then you’d better make it interesting. Childhood ain’t for the weak, after all. It wasn’t until I discussed the book with other adults that I realized that Spinelli essentially makes Hokey Pokey his own childhood. There are tons of kids on bikes (no helmets) and old Warner Brother cartoons on the giant television. Plus there’s Tarzan and not a single video game central to be seen. Writing groups for kids could ask them “What’s your Hokey Pokey” and ask children to describe their own perfect fantasylands. Spinelli’s made his own, but I don’t think kids will necessarily notice. For some reason, Spinelli can put in marbles and an old western pulp feel and who knows what all into this book and you go along with it. Fancy that.

I’m a mom so I read the book as a mother. That’s probably the number one worst way to read this book. I mean talk about a book steeped in nostalgia. People forget that kids love to feel nostalgia for their younger ages. Whether it’s a toddler staring in wonder at pictures of themselves as a baby or a nine-year-old smiling sadly at a six-year-old’s happiness, kids love thinking about the past. It makes perfect sense. As this book shows, the stages of childhood (rather than infanthood) are neatly separated into Gappergums, Longspitters, Newbies, Snotsippers, Sillynillies, etc. A single year in a child’s life provides a whole new universe of experiences! Is it any wonder then that they get nostalgic? When I was a kid I used to love to read Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine because of the feeling it gave me. Now I’m a mom, and so what was my primary concern when I read this book? That if Jubilee is next in line to leave then how’s that going to affect Albert? Trust me when I say that there’s not a kid alive that will think of that. So clearly I am not without my own bizarre filters when I read books for children [though on a related note, how very interesting that Jubilee is allowed to acknowledge her brother in Hokey Pokey but that Jack never acknowledges Kiki. Hm.].

Oh. And did I happen to mention that the writing is rather good? Here I am talking about what the book does without ever getting into the simple matter of what the book IS. And what it IS is good. Spinelli’s not afraid to get a little grandiose in his descriptions if the situation calls for it. As a result you have sentences like, “The dust plume they raised shone golden in the sun, as if a celestial cloud had just then set them down from their home in some paradise of gods.” Earlier Jack mourns his lost in the wake of his rival by yelling. ” `Scraaaaaamjet!’ Jack cries, but his voice is already a hole in the afterwind.” And then there’s the opening sentence . . . but I’ll get to that in a bit.

Spinelli also does some really nice things with legend and community here too. There’s a great short story in The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales” about what happens when the dogs begin to talk. Written by Kij Johnson it’s called “The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change” and what happens is that the dogs begin to tell tales about One Dog, a creature that’s part of their culture. The same could be said for the children of Hokey Pokey. They come up with stories about The Kid, who is seen as almost the first denizen of Hokey Pokey. In a world without religion, storytelling is the closest these children ever come to spirituality. Spinelli is fascinated with the notion of the stories kids tell one another. It’s the framing sequence for Maniac Magee and now it’s a pivotal plot point for Hokey Pokey.

The book is not without its occasional flaw, of course. I was a little disappointed to discover that there would be a map included in this book. To me, a map nails down Hokey Pokey too much. It’s better if it’s vague and shifting and the kind of place you picture in your head. But as someone pointed out to me, the advantage of the map is to establish from the get go that Hokey Pokey is not a neighborhood down the street from you. It’s a fantastical place and you’d better be on board with that from page one onward or you are gonna be lost, sucker. So map it is. The book also sort of drops the whole Destroyer subplot, to a certain extent. In the story, Destroyer is younger than Jack and gets his jollies from ruining the happiness of small children. As far as I can ascertain, Destroyer is in this book solely to show the motivations of bullies and how you can defeat them in your own mind. It’s Jack’s counsel to Jubilee’s little brother Albert regarding Destroyer that’s the focus. What that doesn’t take into account, however, is the fact that we were in Destroyer’s head for a very long time. Suddenly we’re booted out, meant to both loathe and pity him, but we’re never allowed back into his head again. For Destroyer there is no happy ending. You get the distinct feeling he cannot wait to get out of Hokey Pokey and when he does (and if he still has no friends) it could be a very bad situation.

So what the heck will kids get out of this book? Well, the reading will be interesting to watch. A certain strain of child reader will begin to question the world’s internal logic from the get go (i.e. what do the kids eat besides hokey pokeys, how do kids of different ages know that they’re siblings, where do newbies come from, etc.). One might point out that Maniac Magee (again) had ITs own internal logic so this is hardly new territory for Spinelli. Other kid readers will be hugely frustrated by something that doesn’t slot into standard fantasy. Still others will take it at face value and begin to imagine that they’re there. Those are the lucky ones.

There’s also a bit of a debate as to whether or not kids can have this book read aloud to them. I am of the opinion that while it might be chancy if you tried to do it in a group setting, one-on-one would be a better way to go. You have to realize that Spinelli begins this book with a crazy opening worthy of James Joyce (indeed I’ve already heard this book referred to as “the children’s Ulysses“). It’s not impenetrable, just unexpected. We’re all so used to the same kinds of books beginning the same kinds of ways that when we encounter something as unique as a one-page run-on sentence involving Orion and Mooncow and the fall of a lavender star, we’re unprepared. Those kids who read it on their own or read it with a parent and have someone to discuss it with, they might get a lot out of this one. You’ll have to booktalk it so that they get past that first page, but once they’re in, they’ll be in. Hopefully.

“Sometimes the story knows more than the writer.” Madeleine L’Engle said that. I think what she meant was that the reader is going to get something out of a story that might have completely slipped by the writer. And few books for children are as prone to this as Jerry Spinelli’s Hokey Pokey, a book that dares to recast childhood from a time to a place. In interviews Spinelli has said that the main character of this book is childhood itself. It may be divisive, but there’s no denying the writing. Let’s just say this much: Your kids have never read ANYTHING quite like it before. I happen to think that’s a good thing. Try it then.

On shelves now.

Source: Galley copy sent from publisher for review.

Like This? Then Try:

• Doll Bones by Holly Black

• Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

• Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins

Notes on the Cover:  Honestly, it’s still too representational for me.  See, here was the original:

I could see what they were going for, but since it didn’t make the final cut I can’t say I’m surprised that it was ultimately rejected.  This final one is nice and all but a bit too dreamy.  Dunno.  Can’t say what I really wanted it to be, but not quite that either.  We’ll have to see what the paperback comes up with.

Other Blog Reviews:

• Educating Alice
• Confessions of a Bibliovore
• Killin’ Time Reading
• BooksnStories

Professional Reviews:

• A star from Kirkus
• Publishers Weekly
• The Wall Street Journal
• The Examiner

Interviews:

• NPR
• TIME for Kids
• The Buffalo News