by Cybèle Young
published 2014 by Groundwood Books
Don’t you hate throwing your ball out the window and being too short to see where it bounces? The worst.
But the worst gets better, because in its place a spectacular parade clash-crashes by. Except when you’re a frantic, too-short creature, it’s really hard to see over the windowsill. Good thing you’re a clever whippersnapper, and push that chair up to take a peek.
And just when you can finally see outside, the book tells you to turn around.
You’ll stumble smack dab into the spectacle.
Juggling shrimp on a unicycle! A bat on a hanging, clangy contraption! Pink swans pulling a turtle on a wagon!
Thanks to this parade, you might just get your ball back. It’s one fantastic game of catch.
And check out this trailer to see the book in its glorious action. Mesmerizing.
P.S. – Remember the Twitter chat with Groundwood Books and Cybèle Young? The transcript is here, if you want to add to your art-to-study and books-to-love pile. It was such fun!
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My next door neighbor's little girl was on her way to her first day of school today, and she was so proud, sashaying off with a new pink backpack on her shoulders. She didn't seem to have any trepidation about what was in store, but not every child is so lucky. Take Ferdie, the young protagonist of
A Few Blocks by
Cybele Young. He doesn't want to go to school. Not now. Maybe never.
Big sister Viola doesn't badger Ferdie. She just holds out his jacket and tells him it's his superfast cape. "Quick--put on your rocket-blaster boots and we'll take off!" Their imaginations propel the children for a block until Ferdie's rockets run out of fuel. Each time Viola comes to the rescue, coming up with another exciting adventure that gets them going. They travel by rocket-fueled footwear, by ship, and on horseback. Then, surprisingly, it's Viola who conks out and it's up to Ferdie to keep them going that one last block.
As the children switch back and forth from their magical adventures to the mundane, so do the illustrations. The everyday world is shown in shades of black and white, while their fantasy world is fashioned from vivid intricate 3-D paper sculptures that the artist created. Not surprisingly, Young is an artist who specializes in paper sculture. She has illustrated picture books in the past, most notably
Ten Birds, a counting book. In
A Few Blocks she refreshingly shows the special bond that exists between siblings.
A Few Blocks
by Cybele Young
Groundwood Books, 32 pages
Published: August 2011
Help kids look at school from the funny side in the first two picture books and walk to school in wonder in the last.
Ten Rules You Absolutely Must Not Break If You Want to Survive the School Bus, by John Grandits, illustrated by Michael Allen Austin,
Clarion, $16.99, ages 4-8, 32 pages. Kyle has no choice but to gulp down his worries and climb up the school bus. It's his first time on one and he's going to have face it alone, now that his big brother, James, is walking to middle school. Lucky thing James has armed Kyle with a list of dos and don'ts and some cheeky advice, "Just think of what I'd do and try to act like me." But when Kyle accidentally breaks every rule his brother gave him, including talking to a bully, he learns the most important lesson of all: never, absolutely never pay attention to your big brother's rules for the bus. Here's a fun, empowering story to inspire your child to skip up the steps of the bus (and maybe even sit in the first row).
Louise the Big Cheese and the Back-To-School Smarty-Pants, by Elise Primavera, illustrated by Diane Goode,
A Paula Wiseman Book, $16.99, ages 5 and up, 40 pages. Louise wants to be a smarty pants like her big sister and get straight As. But with a taskmistress for a second grade teacher, it's not looking good. If only a gorilla would grab up her teacher and run away with her. Then one day it seems like her wish could come true. Her teacher is absent. But now the substitute is giving everyone in class an A and suddenly an A doesn't feel that special. On top of that, the substitute is letting Louise get away with sloppy work. Could it be that Louise likes to be pushed to do better -- and may actually miss her teacher? Here's a book that shows that it's how hard you try that counts. Don't miss the endpapers for a parade of famous smarty pants. (Uh, Madonna, what are you doing there?)
A Few Blocks, written and illustrated by Cybele Young,
Groundwood, $18.95, ages 4-8, 48 pages. Ferdie doesn't want to
By:
Aline Pereira,
on 5/28/2010
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Jack Pine is a book of poetry for children by Christopher Patton, illus. by Cybele Young (Groundwood, 2007). It is about the Jack Pine (Pinus banksiana), an ubiquitous member of the pine tree family, seen in most parts of boreal Canada and the northern U.S. It’s a gutsy, spindly, tenacious tree, that is hardy but not of particular use to humans. As Patton speaks of the unlovely qualities of the tree, he adds “What matters more than all of this –/ he’s useless. Just useless. No good/for lumber, ships, shingles, or crates./Useless!” But this is not entirely true. The Jack pine has another name. It is often called the ‘nurse tree’ and slowly through the book, the poet reveals this inner quality of the tree.
Cybele Young’s wonderful “illustrations” are a bit of a misnomer since they were originally three dimensional collages of etched paper. The etchings show the Jack Pine in its various states of being — as a seedling or fully grown, juxtaposed against some of the settings where the tree is found. Other varieties of pine like the white and red pines, are also displayed and written about. The array of juxtaposed etched images convey a sense of the dynamic range of the Jack Pine in both setting and poetic ’story.’
Jack Pine felt to me to be a very Canadian poetry book, celebrating a tree most Canadians know well, having seen them from off the highway or in the woods and near farms. When I was young, our family used to go hunting for matsutake mushrooms in the Rockies, and it was under the loose sandy soils where the lodgepole pines (a close relation to the Jack Pine) thrive, that some of the best mushrooms could be found. For us a stand of these particularly ‘useless’ pines was a sign of treasure for what they ‘nursed’ below!
This week Poetry Friday host is Patricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect.
Don’t you hate throwing your ball out the window and being too short to see where it bounces? The worst.
But the worst gets better, because in its place a spectacular parade clash-crashes by. Except when you’re a frantic, too-short creature, it’s really hard to see over the windowsill. Good thing you’re a clever whippersnapper, and push that chair up to take a peek.
And just when you can finally see outside, the book tells you to turn around.
Thanks to this parade, you might just get your ball back. It’s one fantastic game of catch.
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Super adorable! I think my boys would like this.
You know, I've been thinking about starting a blog like this one under my own name. It just seems like a good way to network and learn about the industry (which, given that I'm a college student hoping to become a literary agent, is fairly important to me).
Do you ever hear from the authors of the books you review?