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Trouble Gum by Matthew Cordell
Here is a book. A book with gum. A book with two brothers. A book with two brothers stuck inside on a rainy day who aren't usually allowed gum because - oh my god gum! Gum on the furniture! In the carpet! Gum in the hair! Swallowed gum! Gum on the wee little faces! NO GUM!

My colleague La Mirabile (also the mother of boys) is sitting next to me cackling over this book. Seriously, she's laughing so hard I'm worried she's going to swallow her own gum.

Matthew Cordell illustrated one of my favorite picture books about brothers, Righty & Lefty. Maybe he has sons. Maybe he has brothers. But he sure as heck knows how funny it is when a little boy jumps off the couch and into a pile of cushions and momentarily stuns himself.

Checking out the picture books

Late this summer an entire library of books was delivered to a new school in Baltimore. I should know - I picked all 2,254 of them. It was what you might call a labor of love. Emphasis on the "labor". Actually, emphasis on the love.

As we shelved what amounted to thirty thousand dollars worth of brand-new beautiful books, one of our parent volunteers said, "I bet you've read half the books in this room!" I did a quick scan of a few shelves and admitted that actually, I have read probably upwards of 75% of them. Most of the fiction, all of the picture books, and one heck of a lot of the nonfiction. Wow. I am either really really sad or really really dedicated.

You may hire me to create or maintain your school library collection, and I will certainly not object, but I thought it might be nice to share some of the lists I created. I'll do a series of about a dozen posts, at least the nonfiction, starting with the 000's. This will be my own version of School Library Journal's Series Made Simple issue (which is a great resource, by the way).

The 000's are kind of a weird little miscellany area of a school library. Every school should have a set of the World Book, and please do buy an almanac every year, but if you have the bucks, try to get a few "strange but true" reference books in there. Some kids really respond to Ripley's Believe It Or Not and Guinness World Records. Books like these have a sneaky added benefit - the indexed entries introduce kids to a nonlinear method of approaching a book, important when they're doing real research later.




Gee, Joshua. Encyclopedia Horrifica: The Terrifying Truth About Vampires, Ghosts, Monsters, & More. A kind of weird book to start off with, but, as the kid says in Beetlejuice, "I myself am strange and unusual."

Teitelbaum, Michael. Bigfoot Caught on Film: And Other Monster Sightings!. The 24/7: Science Behind the Scenes series from Scholastic is... it's ok. Little niblets of info, good for hooking readers, but it's nice to have something with a little more depth to back these books up, in case your readers do get interested in the subject. I picked carefully through this series and selected just a few titles.

Prieto, Anita C. B Is For Bookworm: A Library Alphabet. These alphabet books from Sleeping Bear Press are a bit uneven. This one is pretty dry, but I wanted to fill out a small suite of library-themed books. If you're tempted by the ABC book for your state, or about a particular subject, be sure to get your hands on it and read it through first. Some of the words can be awfully obscure.

Ruurs, Margriet. My Librarian Is A Camel: How Books Are Brought To Children Around The World. How people live around the world is a particularly important theme in this school, and one that I personally find important. Kids find the juxtapositions fascinating, too. The pictures in this book are very nice.

Farndon, John. Visual Encyclopedia (DK). I keep buying and buying this book, and they keep loving and loving it until they love it to pieces. I'm not the world's be-all end-all fan of Dorling Kindersley - I don't think they fact-check hard enough - but this single-volume encyclopedia + elementary school kids = LOVE.

Aronson, Marc. For Boys Only: The Biggest, Baddest Book Ever. Frankly? I bought this on Jon Scieszka's recommendation. More graphically interesting and up-to-date looking than that other "dangerous" book, which I swear was written for parents.

Farndon, John. Do Not Open. Irresistable, full of fun facts about freaky stuff, several activities and suggestions for bringing the info in the book to life. Worth the few extra bucks. My 8 year old got a copy of this for his birthday and was enraptured. His little brother is learning to read just as fast and as hard as he can so he can have a turn with it.

Macdonald, Guy. Even More Children's Miscellany: Smart, Silly, and Strange Information That's Essential to Know. Same stuff, but for smaller kids.

McDonald, Megan. Stink-O-Pedia: Super Stink-y Stuff From A To ZZZZ. I like Stink Moody. I like him better than his sister, Judy. I buy Judy Moody, but I buy Stink too. He's funny, he's good-hearted, he's a 'second chapter book' for boys who think fantasy is pointless. Stink reads encyclopedias in his spare time, so I thought I'd offer his fans Stink's very own encyclopedia.

Murrie, Steve & Matthew. Every Minute On Earth: Fun Facts That Happen Every 60 Seconds. I never can seem to find enough books about time. Time is hard to explain. So when this book arrived at the public library, I snatched it. I stood and read it between customers at the information desk and I figured if I was fascinated enough to read it all the way through, surely somebody in that school would be too.

Mark, Jan. Museum Book: A Guide To Strange And Wonderful Collections. This is Baltimore, baby. We've got a light bulb museum and a teeth museum and we used to have a dime museum. We are to strange and wonderful as Paris is to lovely and inspiring.

Marcus, Leonard S. Side by Side: Five Favorite Picture-Book Teams Go to Work. Marvelous funny anecdotes, lots of illustrations showing all steps of the creative process, a very nice introduction to the concept of collaboration. Terrible cover though.

Creature ABC by Andrew Zuckerman

Andrew Zuckerman has made an entire little industry out of the images from his big fat Christmas-present book Creature. There are notecards and floor puzzles and a calendar, and now there's an ABC book.

I kind of can't fault the guy for it, either. When I swung open the cover of Creature abc, I gasped. His pictures of animals great and small - details, portraits, and full-length shots - are lit so brightly I worry for their fur, and shot (and printed) at such a high resolution as to appear three-dimensional. I just looked through the portraits (of humans) on his web site, and I didn't actually want to be that close to Nick Nolte.

The big bold black sans-serif text is easy to read. The little fact boxes about each animal that appear at the end are easy to digest. And there is just nothing funner than turning each thick page with a three year old. "What is that animal? It's a LION, you're right! Is that lion gonna eat you? NO! You eat that lion up first!"

Definitely my new favorite present for two- and three-year-olds.

The Lion and the Mouse by Jerry Pinkney

Jerry Pinkney is a god. I think that's my whole review. No, wait, I have to mention that this book is wordless (except for beautifully lettered onomatopoeia incorporated into the paintings).

In a year when Jerry Pinkney also illustrated The Moon Over Star, I think he is his own stiffest competition for a Caldecott.

Call Me Gorgeous by Giles and Alexandra Milton
I have the eyes of a lemur and the beak of an octopus, the skin of a monitor lizard and the broken toes of an unfortunate debutante.

Actually, none of that is true. What I have are the eyes of a Scots-Irish Protestant and the posture of a Hungarian peasant - my fractious temperament is like that of my New England ancestors and my ability to tan comes from generations of watermen on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

Pieces of various creatures (eye of frog, feet of chicken) lead the reader of the happy, beautiful Call Me Gorgeous! to expect a monstrous chimera, when instead, the creature at the end of this book is quite fabulous - and she knows it! Colored pencils and collages of handmade paper make the teeth of the alligator look sharp and the ears of the pig soft, the chameleon's tail scaly and the bat wings veiny.

We are all hybrids, and this book exalts our stitched-together-ness without whomping the reader over the head with bullhorned messages about DIFFERENCES! CHERISHING THEM! and LABELS! BOO TO LABELS! Would make a fun read-aloud.

Endpaper bonus: each animal shown in its entirety.

Always lots of heinies at the zoo, written by Ayun Halliday, illustrations by Dan Santat
The author of the zine East Village Inky has written a picture book. That's it, my world just exploded.

I read Ayun Halliday's account of new motherhood, The Big Rumpus, when my older son was just a few months old. In that book, Ayun carted her daughter India around the East Village in a sling, wondering if her Dead Kennedys t-shirts were ever going to shrink back to normal after having worn them over her pregnant belly. Or something like that. As Ayun listlessly swiped at crusty wads of mushy peas on the kitchen floor and speculated over random puddles (apple juice? or pee?), I laughed the laugh of the unbelievably sleep-deprived. Good times.

Good times at the zoo, too, I'm happy to report. "No one tries to hide his heinie at the zoo." Like Chicken Cheeks (reviewed earlier), we get lots of fun heinie synonymy: tushy, glutes, can, and even caboose. Unlike Chicken Cheeks (reviewed earlier), we have an elephant with "junk in her supplemental trunk" - kind of steep slang for the K-3 set, and I think they're going to love it.

The vaguely Adam Rex-y, J.Otto Seibold-y illustrations are fine, not super-noteworthy (although, gotta say, GOOD MONKEYS), but composed very well. I love the portraits of Ayun and her husband Greg on the dedication page.

By the way, Ayun, if you're reading this: my colleague Dances with Chickens thinks this book would make a terrific little song. Maybe Greg can run something up.

1000 Times No by Tom Warburton
I was on the desk in the children's department earlier tonight, and a lady had a baby and a little girl. When she got the call from her husband: "Come on home, dinner's almost ready," the baby started fussing and the little girl lost it. "NO!" she wailed. My kids are 20 months apart, and boy I remember that sinking feeling when you realize just how far it is to the exit, and how long your walk of shame will be, escorting not one but two shrieking bundles of raw nerves.

So on their way out I asked the little girl if she'd like a brand new book to check out, if that would make leaving the library any easier. With the tears still on her face and her breath hitching, she accepted the book solemnly. (It's the pink hair, folks, I don't kid myself)

But when the mom saw the title, she cracked up. Me too, I have to say. Noah doesn't want to leave when mom (wearing very sassy boots, I note appreciatively) says it's time. On each page he communicates "NO!" in a different way - via text message and tin can telephone, in Mongolian, Zulu, Tagalog and Robot, through heiroglyphics and by means of a vigorous head-shake. Noah is accessorized or contextualized appropriately for each utterance, until, on one page, a thousand Noahs sit in the seats of a boisterous U.N., all voicing their disapproval.

Endpaper bonus: Noah a thousand times (not really), in all his different hats.

Internet bonus: spacedlaw pointed me to the book trailer on YouTube. Even cuter!

Life-size zoo by Teruyuki Komiya
Quivering, wet noses. Fluffy red panda fur and coarse capybara hair. Soft brown anteater eyes. Sharp tiger teeth. These oversized, luscious photographs of many of our favorite zoo friends show ever aardvark whisker and elephant eyelash in bright, sharp detail. Yum!

As advertised, each animal is shown life-sized. Majiron the armadillo takes up about half a page, while Lulu the giraffe gets a double fold-out. The right-hand border of each page gives information about the animal: name, age, interesting facts (tapirs can open and close their nostrils!), and details to look for in the photo.

Gonna be a storytime favorite and a very popular item in the school library. It might even end up my default birthday present for the summer.

Tillie Lays An Egg by Terry Golson with photography by Ben Fink
Chickens, like penguins, are always funny. When I had chickens, and, yes, I had chickens in my city backyard, I used to go out a couple times a day to just sit and watch them bumble around and giggle to myself. Chickens - well I don't think I'm going to offend them by saying this - chickens are... not bright. My chickens, for example, were dumb enough to get themselves eaten by anything with teeth, and at least one thing without teeth. I've sworn off keeping chickens because I can't endure the heartbreak of losing any more. Hawks, foxes, raccoons, a dog, and I think possibly a family of possums consumed a total of eleven chickens at my house.



So I dedicate my review of this darling book in loving memory of Micker-Micker and Mrs. Miller, timid Penguin, big beautiful Barge, rock star Lou, Lou Two, three pullets that the kindergarten had raised from chicks, and two bad-tempered Polish hens whose names I can't remember. The funny, fun, beautiful photographs in Tillie Lays an Egg made me heave a wistful sigh thinking of how wonderful it was for my kids to have a chance to observe the life cycle firsthand, to think about food and where it comes from, and how nice it was to pet those gorgeous girls.

As you can probably tell from my photos, taking pictures of chickens is not easy. Either they are curious about the camera, and you get freaky close-up pictures of beaks and eyes - not the most attractive aspect of a chicken - or they are terrified of the camera, and run like idiots as soon as they see it. So the photographs in Tillie Lays an Egg, which are well-lit, in focus, and STAGED, for goodness sake! are not only entertaining, but really impressive.

As is the concept as a whole. Tillie, a chicken who thinks outside the coop, prefers wandering in search of worms to waiting for her turn in a nesting box. Every day she explores a different corner of the farm, and every day she lays her egg in an unexpected place. Children and adults have been observed enjoying the hunt for Tillie's eggs in each day's picture, and chuckling over the vintage chicken-themed items that pop up here and there - a chicken doormat, board games, table linens, and a juice glass that I covet.

I can't think of a more lovely hommage to these sometimes underappreciated farmyard friends, and I was so pleased to read that the chickens in the book - and all the chickeny props - are the author's own. I look forward to the further adventures of Tillie.

All in a day by Cynthia Rylant, illustrated by Nikki McClure

I could not help thinking of Jonathan Bean when I took up this book. Nikki McClure's virtuoso cut-paper illustrations resemble woodcuts in much the same way his do, and she too can make a palette of black and white plus one color conjure whatever she wants. Here's the book: a little boy on a farm wanders through his day, climbing trees and watching clouds and whatnot, with measured, gentle text that conveys a peaceful message that you don't get all that often in picture books:

This day will soon be over
and it won't come back again.
So live it well, make it count,
fill it up with you.
The day's all yours, it's waiting now...
See what you can do.

Marveltown by Bruce McCall
When I plucked this big sunny square off the Professional Review shelves at work and surveyed the faux- Fifties Futurist paintings, I flashed back to pulling old books on rocket science off my Dad's shelves when I was a kid. The illustrations in those books were so intriguing - immense curved structures with impossibly thin floors and spires, a few tiny humans scratched in to give them scale; cratered surfaces and craggy mountains; big control rooms stocked with banks of giant flanged capacitors and oversized dials... but the books would always disappoint. I would expect breathless stories full of firecracker surprises, but... there was a lot of nonfiction in our house. Those books would actually be about rocket science. Lots of parabolas and charts.

I shook my head paging through Marveltown, thinking that Bruce McCall had a lot of fun creating a catalog of outscale inventions, and thinking that just drawing lots of cool stuff does not make a book.

What a fantastic surprise, therefore, to turn a page and, beneath a painting of a huge control room with banks of flanged capacitors and oversized dials, see the words, "Until one quiet midnight..." A story! A robot rebellion! Yeah!!

I couldn't wait to get Marveltown home to my boys. I wanted to see whether my enthusiasm was purely based on my retro-futurist nostalgia - ideas of the future that were old when I was a kid: Helmut Karl Wimmer's paintings from the old Hayden Planetarium, which came down when I was working at AMNH; the illustrations of Frank Tinsley and Chesley Bonestell; the villain's control room in old Bond movies; silly stuff from very old MAD magazines. There's a picture in Marveltown of a terrified guy in a hat, his pipe flying from his mouth as he runs screaming, that I think is a direct quote from a Kelly Freas painting.

The interesting thing about Bruce McCall, in this context, is that Wikipedia says the man is 73 years old - same age as my Dad. These illustrators that I am all nostalgic over... their careers overlapped his. These ARE his visions of the future. Makes Marveltown extra-sweet to me.

So let's hear from our panel. Here's what the boys said as Mao read the book aloud:

"It's supposed to be the kids are the run-away-ers and the grownups are the stayers, but it's the opposite!"

"How about they don't make living robots, they just make working robots?"

"Whoa, that's what somebody invented?" (about a tall crack-the-whip Maypole kind of thing that... ok yeah I can't describe it)
"That is totally better than a big robot."

"The ripple-rug was my favorite invention."
"The metal dog who ate everyone's homework was my favorite, because he was a great guard dog."

Does it make you want to invent things?
"Makes me want to want to turn our LEGOtown into Marveltown! With giant robots! With a couple different things, with the robots only attacking three grownups - bad guy grownups - not Skeletor, because he's dead. They would attack Larry Jenkins, 50-foot Spreitel, and The Boss."

Ok, so... any questions?

BEWARE OF THE FROG by william bee
This is one for motherreader's Weird Ass Picture Book category. I read it with my seven-year-old, and he LOVED it. But my husband overheard us, and after the kid scampered away chuckling, he said, "That's... that's awfully DARK, wouldn't you say?"

Heh heh heh... yeah man. The surprise ending in this one is kicky, and funny, and brilliantly colored (green! pink! yellow like no yellow on this earth!), AND dark.

William Bee's illustrations are scratchy, detailed, full of great little patterns and ornaments, and remind me of jazzy pen-and-ink illustrations from when I was a kid (call that early '70's). They almost look like they'd make a great hipster t-shirt. Or a Target product line. Or wallpaper in the powder room in the basement of a swinger's suburban ranch house. And there's a little South Park to the faces. Are you having a hard time collating this description in your head? Ha. Read the book. See if you can do better.

Here is a synopsis - maybe that will help: a little old lady (Mrs. Collywobbles) lives on the edge of the ghetto (ok, the deep dark woods) protected only by her little pet frog. Big monsters come out of the forest one by one to steal from, stink at, or eat Mrs. Collywobbles. They see the sign, "BEWARE OF THE FROG" and scoff. And then the little frog eats them.

GOBBLE. GOBBLE. GOBBLE.

And then there's a surprise ending, which, ok, I know it's a picture book, and usually I have no scruples about spoilers for picture books, but it's a real treat to read a picture book that you can't anticipate, and I wish you that treat.

Dinosaur vs. bedtime by Bob Shea
Oh. Mygod. How much do children love reading this book?! Even kids who aren't reading yet can read this book. And they love to do it!

I finally got a chance to read it to my two kids tonight, but even then I didn't really! They chimed in with all the ROAR ROAR ROARs, they loved doing a high-pitched, hysterical announcer voice for every challenge the dinosaur faces: "Dinosaur versus... A BOWL OF SPAGHETTI!!" and oh GOD did they love "Dinosaur versus... TALKING GROWN-UPS!" BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH!

And they even enjoyed the winding-down part of this tried-and-true story arc, as Dinosaur's ROARs wane and his eyelids droop, until finally, "Bedtime wins." Usually, my kids are too savvy - they see it coming and they kind of roll their eyes, "Oh sure, of course the kid runs out of steam and it's time for bed." They know it's a ploy meant to get THEM into bed, and they resent it. But it's so fun to turn those ROARs into yawns, they buy in completely.

Bob Shea, king of the LOUD picture book.

The Three Robbers by Tomi Ungerer
Here's an old book that is worth a fresh look. Originally published in 1962, the same year as Where the Wild Things Are , The Three Robbers is a weird little tale of three fierce little criminals in tall black caps and cloaks.

Armed with a blunderbuss, a pepper blower, and an alarmingly large axe, the three hold up carriages and steal the passengers' cash, jewels, watches, and bearer bonds, then take the loot back to their cave. One night, they hold up a carriage containing only a little orphan named Tiffany, who is en route to live with a "wicked aunt" and only too happy to have been intercepted. The robbers take her back to the cave and give her a place to sleep. In the morning, taking stock of her surroundings, she asks, "What is all this treasure for?" and the robbers are stumped, never having considered spending their booty.

Together, the robbers and Tiffany decide to round up all the lost and abandoned children they can find and buy a castle for them to live in. All the kids get red capes and tall red hats like the robbers' black ones, and when they grow up, they build houses near the castle, and a lovely little town is born.

Reading this to my kindergartner last night, I at first thought of monastery towns. The robbers in their capes reminded me of monks in their habits, and the ending kind of reeks of folktale (reeks in a nice way - reeking like potato soup with lots of garlic, say). The story has something of a Bremen Town Musicians vibe to it, and I was wondering if it was the kind of story a child would make up about a medieval orphanage run by monks.

My mind kept catching on the robbers' cluelessness about their loot. That is very kid. Arguably, that's specifically very boy. With them, the goal is the action (in this case, robbing) - the action is rarely the means to the goal. Whereas girls, in my observation, often have more complex goals in mind, and develop strategies - sometimes mind-boggling complex strategies - in order to attain them.

Ergo, you could read The Three Robbers as an allegory of play. Three boys are playing their pointless yet fun game; a girl comes along; they charitably include her in their play; she doesn't get it, but figures out an extension to their game that makes sense to her, and they end up building a doll hospital for her.

You could also just enjoy this book for the hats. I love the hats.

Tyrannosaurus Drip by Julia Donaldson, illustrated by David Roberts
David Roberts does it again. The artist who brought us Pucci dresses and dirty diapers in Iggy Peck, Architect, and Kate Bush albums recycled as art in The Dumpster Diver proves that he is equally adept at portraying the natural world.

Tyrannosaurus Drip is the story of a duckbill dinosaur who hatches in a T. rex nest. Talk about your fish out of water. There's a whole bunch of back and forth about the Tyrannosaurs trying to eat the duckbills, and the baby veggie-saur not fitting in with his meat-eating parents, as you might expect, but the real joy here is the syncopated, funky rhythmic language.

And they shouted, "Up with hunting!"
And they shouted, "Up with war!"
And they shouted, "Up with bellyfuls of duckbill dinosaur!"

Penguins by Liz Pichon
Okay, it's another penguin book. Love the penguins. 365 penguins, Polly Dunbar's penguin, Sergio the penguin, penguins really seem to bring out the best in illustrators. And by that metric, Liz Pichon's penguin book is cute and appealing. BUT.

The penguins in this book live in the zoo, and after everybody leaves one day, they find a camera. "DON'T TOUCH IT!" says a mama penguin. They investigate. The baby penguin jumps on it and says, "Lets press ALL the buttons!" When the flash goes off, they all get bug eyes. FLASH! The penguins all make like loony little kids with the camera, and when it runs out of film (film!), they put it back where they found it. It's put in the lost and found, and eventually reclaimed.

And when the film is developed...

Bone Soup by Cambria Evans
I am a sucker for illustrations with little diagram arrows. They funny. And on the first page of this Halloweeny version of the old Stone Soup story, we get big arrows pointing to little Finnegan's special eating stool, his eating spoon, and his big, wide, friendly Eating Mouth.

Deep, spectral colors balance the cuteness of Cambria Evans's pen and ink zombies, monsters and other spookies.

A winner for Halloween and beyond.

Peg Leg Peke by Brie Spangler
Oh my gosh! A boo-boo! A broken leg! Well then, let's see if we can distract you from your sorrow... and that's exactly what the author does when she meets this sweetie little toddler Pekingese. A good book to have on hand when the kid goes facefirst skidding into the concrete, or had to have a splinter out, or got stung by a bee.

Big fat hen by Keith Baker
Don't forget to bring this home, buy new copies for your library, use it for baby storytime, or just sit and enjoy the lush, textured, colorful paintings of Keith Baker. "Complex, but not subtle" - that has been said about my cooking, and I'd like to say it about Keith Baker's work.

Battling the giant flying fish in 3D
Originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian

In my house, after dinner, there is frequently a game called Dad Dad Mister Mad.

You may have a game like this in your house too.

My husband is Dad Dad Mister Mad, who takes on different identities every night: The Evil X, The Flying Velociraptor, Larry Jenkins, to name but a few. My boys (the two on the right in this picture) are the good guys, naturally. The one in the middle is frequently a double agent of some kind. One night he was an arms dealer who intentionally sold a defective weapon to The Evil X, so that his brother would have an advantage in the final battle.

It's good imaginative fun, although now that they've been watching the Olympics and have been exposed to Greco-Roman wrestling, I have suggested that my husband buy himself a cup. Those kids are getting bigger.

The part I love the most is prior to the action. The three of them sit together and plot out the night's adventure in some detail before they begin. My husband has found that it's better to be pro-active than reactive when it comes to superheroic misunderstandings.

The same can be said for Baron von Baddie and his arch-enemy, Captain Kapow. No matter how nefarious the plans of evil genius Baron von Baddie, Captain Kapow always thwarts them, saves the day, and puts Baron von Baddie in the clink.



Until one day, when, completely by accident, Baron von Baddie - wins. Captain Kapow is out of the action! The Baron can eat all the doughnuts he wants!

But, just as my heroes would be bored without the evil Dad Dad Mister Mad to thwart, Baron von Baddie becomes sick of doughnuts, uses his genius to restore Captain Kapow, and, after a brief jail term contemplating his evil ways, resumes them with gusto.

I probably do not need to add that George McClements's toothy, tactile collage illustrations are inventive and engaging - you know that already. But I will say that I just love the Baron. With his shiny black rubber gloves, dark goggles, necktie, and shock of black hair, he is a tiny little baddie for the ages. Like a little Victor von Frankenstein, or Dr. Lizardo in Buckaroo Banzai.

Hooray!

The house that Max built by Maxwell Newhouse
Nice. Nice to have a step-by-step building book that is painterly, diverse, scenic, and a little bit funky.

Somewhat minimal text accompanies oil paintings of Max, a white-haired grownup with a black Yorkie on a green leash, who works with dozens of professionals to build his dream house by a lake. I like that the architect is a woman. I like that the people working on his house wear turbans, earrings, headscarves, berets (although they all wear hard hats when it's appropriate - safety first!). Men and women hang drywall and install insulation. And the Yorkie gets into everything.

But what made me sigh, as a grownup, was how steady and seamless and sane it all seemed. From Max's sketch to a tight new house with a porch and a lake view, everyone is smiling and happy in their work. Not a bankruptcy or a no-show contractor to be seen.

My big pink book of everything by Chez Picthall & Christina Gunzi - review
Ok, how can I not review this book? The blog is called Pink Me, for gosh sake, and, even though I don't automatically gravitate toward everything pink, there is the hair to consider. I get a lot of respect from little girls because of the hair. So I owe it to those kids to check this book out and decide whether it is offensive in its traipse through the gender-specific minefield, or whether it is largely innocuous, and will not set little girls off down the path that leads to brand-name materialism and low math scores.

Because that's what we're talking about. I don't care if some young thing ends up reading the It Girl books or the Clique novels, as long as she keeps reading something, and keeps coming to the library. As long as there are enough other messages in her life telling her that she is for more than gossip and shopping.

So, what does My big pink book of everything tell a girl that she is for? First of all, she is certainly a person who can learn her numbers, her colors, and her shapes. That's what this book is: an early learning book not unlike many others. Pinker. Populated entirely by girls. But perfectly serviceable. The "name the foods" page has lots of healthy things like cherries and tomatoes and cheese, but also cupcakes and a doughnut, which I think is nice. I always felt preached-at by the books that only showed healthy foods. The little girls are black, white, Latina, mixed-race, Asian. Like a box of doughnuts themselves, actually.

And then there's page 18. "My busy day." All the activities pictured on this page are domestic duties: cooking, sweeping, washing clothes, gardening, pushing a doll carriage. What, no ironing? The very next page, ok, is about playing, and the little girls take a break from their chores by dancing, playing soccer, fishing, reading, drawing, etc. So I should probably relax. After all, my two boys did lots of pretend cooking in their day. Although not so much pretend clothes washing - that's a new one on me.

Bottom line: My big pink book of everything is an appealing, colorful book with lots of interaction. Will it fry your retinas? You bet. Look up from this book after only a few pages and you get a big green splotch in your field of vision. But will it fry your daughter's brain? Nope. Leave that to Barbie.

The Littlest Dinosaur by Michael Foreman
Michael Foreman has had a long and impressive career. He creates beautiful watercolors and sometimes writes wonderful books.

A parent picked up The Littlest Dinosaur tonight at work, saying, "Oh, my son loves dinosaurs". I looked at the cover illustration, a pensive, wee ceratopsid sitting atop a blue hill, gazing into the blue evening sky, and I thought to myself, "I bet that book isn't about dinosaurs. I bet that book Teaches Us Something About Ourselves." Something about all that blue. And now, oh, you stop it. I do NOT dislike ALL books with a message right off the bat. If a book charms me, I don't care what it's trying to tell me.

So we have a loving mama dinosaur who hatches a clutch of eggs. All but one egg, which mama guards with obsessive care. Eventually, papa dinosaur, tired of taking care of all the other kids while she fusses over the egg, puts his face down next to it and yells, "Do something!" Whereupon the egg cracks. My colleague Dances With Chickens was reading the book with me. I turned to her and said, "Look, yelling at your kids really does work!" We turned the page and from the egg emerged the tiniest dinosaur ever seen. Dances With Chickens observed, "Yeah, but you get less out of them."

So tiny dinosaur lives a lonely, perilous life among his giant family... until! One day everyone else gets stuck in the mud and he has to go for help, enlisting a humongous longneck, who plucks the ceratopsid family from the muck. "I thought I was too big and clumsy to do anything useful," he said, "but now I know that's not true."

Me? I suppose I'm too tired and cynical to do anything useful. When I saw those dinos in the mud, I had been hoping for some La Brea sabertooth action. MmmROWR!

The House in the Night by Susan Marie Swanson, pictures by Beth Krommes
Finally got ahold of this much-praised new picture book the other day. In nested prose ("In the house burns a light. In that light rests a bed. On that bed waits a book."), the author takes us on a swooping, quiet journey through and above a summer night. And in scratchboard illustrations nearly as detailed as something by a Geisert, the illustrator pulls us in and slows us down.

Hypnotic. That's the word. Good for many a moment of stillness with a small child, even one who is rarely still.