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Today we have two books from the Little Masters, Baby Lit® Books collection from publisher Gibbs Smith, author Jennifer Adams, and illustrator Alison Oliver.  The first, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, is a coloring primer that will paint this week’s big day red and green. Then Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a counting primer, will put [...]

The Swing
By Robert Louis Stevenson
Illustrated By Julie Morstad
Simply Read Books
$8.95
ISBN: 978-1897476482
Ages 0-3
On shelves August 15th

There comes a moment in a new parent’s life when they realize that they have become their own parents. It’s different for everyone. For some folks it won’t happen until they’re berating their teenagers, conjuring up terms and threats from their own youth that they swore they’d never use. For others, it happens at practically the moment after conception. And for me, it happened when I read my one-year-old daughter Julie Morstad’s simply irresistible adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic poem The Swing. As I read the book aloud I realized that I had heard this poem myself as a child. I could even recall the images that accompanied it, filled with sickly sweet children with cheeks so large they’d make the Campbell Soup kids seem wan in comparison. And when later I heard my own mother recite this poem I was amazed to discover that my reading, which I’d done several time for my own daughter, contained the exact same cadences and turns of phrase as my mother’s rendition. The difference for my daughter will be the fact that while the art accompanying my The Swing was tepid, the images that appear in Julie Morstad’s gorgeous little board book are utterly lovely creations. For all those parents desperate to introduce their toddlers to poetry, or just folks who want to read their kids something beautiful for once, here is the answer to your prayers.

“How do you like to go up in a swing / Up in the air so blue?” I should think you’d like it very much if you were one of the children in Julie Morstad’s clever little book. Adapting Robert Louis Stevenson’s words, Ms. Morstad fills her pages with kids on their way up, their way down, and everywhere in-between. They glide under cherry blossoms, observe the even rows of plants and vegetables, and swing like superheroes on their bellies. The result is a haunting but thoroughly enjoyable update to a poem that feels as fresh and fun as it was the day it was first published in the late 1800s.

Etsy has been a simultaneous boon and problem for the children’s picture book world. On the one hand, there is no better place for editors to find up and coming artists. Never before has a public forum of this scope yielded such rich artistic talent. On the other hand, there is a kind of Etsy “look” that typifies the people found there. It’s what allows reviewers like myself to view certain kinds of children’s books and sniff “Etsy” when we want to put them down. Now at a first glance Morstad’s work on The Swing might strike you as falling in the Etsy vein. An unfair assumption since as far as I can tell Ms. Morstad sells her art herself and not through Etsy. More to the point, this book is better than that. Granted I wouldn’t mind taking some of the images found in the book and framing them on my wall (particularly that cover image with the black background and white haired girl swinging through a field of vibrant blossoms). But there’s a quality to Ms. Morstad’s art that feels more than merely trendy. There’s a lot of beauty here, and it

They’ve never much appealed to me before, but with my future spawn a-kicking in my midriff, it’s high time I started seeking out some of the better quality board books out there.  After all, I ain’t reading no junk to the fledgling.  So it is we begin a new series here on Fuse #8: Board Book Investigations.  Today’s subject: The Prince of Preschool – Hervé Tullet.

America is experiencing a Tullet-i-zation of massive proportions.  A Tullet invasion, if you will.  His books have at long last crossed the Atlantic Ocean to invade our shores and force our nation’s children to read.  Or so I am led to believe.

It started slowly on his part.  Technically his books have been coming out here in America for years, but they hadn’t quite caught on until now.  For example, in 2009 Tate Publishing brought out a strange little number called The Coloring Book.  It was pretty much just that, but with a twist.  Tullet isn’t content in just doing coloring books.  He must do AWESOME coloring books.  This 100 Scope Notes review says more on the subject, but it’s one of the rare blogger reviews of Tullet you will find.  For the most part, he’s been overlooked.

So who is this guy?  Well, first off, he looks like this:

Yup.  That is precisely what I would envision a French preschool expert to look like.  He has a website, of course, that is worth trolling through just so long as you can handle the four-leafed blobs that bounce and cavort about your screen like Lucky Charms on LSD.

This year you’re going to hear Tullet’s name primarily because of his book Press Here, coming out with Chronicle.  This book trailer probably says more about the title than I ever could:

All this I knew, but his board books were a complete surprise.

Recently I received in the mail six Hervé Tullet board books from Phaidon.  Phaidon doesn’t usually send me all that many books (they don’t print that many children’s titles to begin with).  I was intrigued by these, particularly since board books are such a strange world.  As Martha Parravano writes in A Family of Readers, “The must successful board-book creators tap in babies’ enthusiasms, attention spans, and (occasionally) senses of humor.”  How does all that change when you’re facing high-end board books with a French pedigree and the Phaidon symbol staring out at you from the spine?  Let’s see.

First up: