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by JiHyeon Lee  (Chronicle Books, 2015)

Hello to you! And you! And you!

Here I am, ready to flip my g o n e  f i s h i n g sign back around.

First, have you had a nice summer? I have been away from the grind, sitting on a deck, writing books and reading them, and it’s been so very nice to be off the grid for a while. But I do miss my books.

You might have seen today’s floating around this summer, and I can’t think of a better one to celebrate the season.

Pool. The word itself conjures up both serenity and splashing chaos, and both of those things exist inside this book.

At its heart, this is a tale of a friendship. Even as grownups there’s a dance to the early moments of togetherness, and this story is that thing in book form.

A boy at the edge of a pool, all the hope of his day before him. A crowd, scary with its wacky floats and almost-tentacles.

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That’s when he dives, under it all and to the quiet, and that’s when he meets his friend. And that’s when things get weird. Isn’t that how it is with friendship? You see new things together, you name the new things together, you create a new kind of community together. The fish and plants and the world under the crazies is bizarre to us, but is it to them? Perhaps not.

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That’s the beauty of finding a friend in the quiet places, whether or not you were looking.

And at the end, when the crowd is exiting to the left, the friends leave to the right. Those two, going forward. Together.

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This is one of those books that I fell in love with when I first saw the cover. And it’s worth wondering why.

I love that the face could belong to either the girl or the boy. I like to think it’s after the magic, both because of the sweet smile and the still-dreamy fish, reflected and real. And I love that by staring at us, it’s almost an invitation. To play, to swim, to step away from the crowd at the edge of the pool.

Can’t get enough of this book? Me either! Here are some other places I loved reading about it. Danielle at This Picture Book Life paired it with the most adorable pool floats (ice cream sandwich!), and there’s still enough summer left to make that dream a reality! JiHyeon Lee is over at Picturebook Makers talking about the story behind the story and shares some process pictures, which I can’t ever get enough. And you can download some free Pool wallpapers at Chronicle’s happy home online. Enjoy the swim!

Thanks to Chronicle for the images in this post!

Sidewalk Flowers
By JonArno Lawson
Illustrated by Sydney Smith
$16.95
ISBN: 978-1-55498-431-2
Ages 3-6
On shelves March 17th

When you live in a city, nature’s successes can feel like impositions. We have too many pigeons. Too many squirrels. Too many sparrows, and roaches, and ants. Too many . . . flowers? Flowers we don’t seem to mind as much but we certainly don’t pay any attention to them. Not if we’re adults, anyway. Kids, on the other hand, pay an exquisite amount of attention to anything on their eye level. Particularly if it’s a spot of tangible beauty available to them for the picking. Picture books have so many functions, but one of them is tapping into the mindset of people below the ages of 9 or 10. A good picture book gets down to a child’s eye level, seeing what they’re seeing, reveling in what they’re reveling in. Perspective and subject matter, art and heart, all combine with JonArno Lawson and Sydney Smith’s Sidewalk Flowers. Bright spots of joy and comfort, sometimes it takes a kid to see what anyone else might claim isn’t even there.A girl and her father leave the grocery to walk the city streets home. As he leads, he is blind to the things she sees. A tattooed stranger. A woman in a cab. And on one corner, small dandelions poking out of the sidewalk. As the two walk she finds more and more of the beauties, and gathers them into a bouquet. Once that’s done she finds ways of giving them out. Four to the dead bird on the sidewalk. One to the homeless man asleep on the bench. Five tucked into the collar of a dog. Home once more she plants flowers in her mother’s hair and behind her brothers’ ears. Then, with the last blossom, she tucks it behind her own ear. That done, she’s ready to keep walking, watching and noticing.

Now JonArno Lawson, I know. If I had my way his name would grace the tongue of every children’s librarian in America. However, he is both Canadian and a poet and the dual combination dooms his recognition in the United States. Canadians, after all, cannot win most of the American Library Association awards and poets are becoming increasingly rare beasts in the realm of children’s literature. Time was you couldn’t throw a dart without hitting one or two children’s poets (albeit the slow moving ones). Now it sometimes feels like there are only 10-15 in any given year. Treat your children and read them The Man in the Moon Fixer’s Mask if ever you get a chance. Seen in this light, the idea of a poet turned wordless picture book author is unusual. It’s amazing that a man of words, one that finds such satisfaction in how they are strung together, could step back and realize from the get-go that this story could be best served only when the words themselves were removed.

A picture book as an object is capable of bringing to the attention of the reader those small moments of common grace that make the world ever so slightly better. In an interview with Horn Book editor Roger Sutton, author JonArno Lawson cited the inspiration for this book: “Basically, I was walking with my daughter down an ugly street, Bathurst Street, in Toronto, not paying very close attention, when I noticed she was collecting little flowers along the way . . . What struck me was how unconscious the whole thing was. She wasn’t doing it for praise, she was just doing it.” I love this point. The description on the back of this book says that “Each flower becomes a gift, and whether the gift is noticed or ignored, both giver and recipient are transformed by their encounter.” I think I like Lawson’s interpretation better. What we have here is a girl who is bringing beauty with her, and disposing of it at just the right times. It becomes a kind of act of grace. Small beauties. Small person.

Now we know from Roger’s interview that Lawson created a rough dummy of the book and the way he envisioned it, but how artist Sydney Smith chose to interpret that storyline seems to have been left entirely up to him. Wordless books give an artist such remarkable leeway. I’ve seen some books take that freedom and waste it on the maudlin, and I’ve seen others make a grab for the reader’s heart only to miss it by a mile. The overall feeling I get from Sidewalk Flowers, though, is a quiet certitude. This is not a book that is pandering for your attention and love. Oh, I’m sure that some folks out there will find the sequence with the homeless man on the bench a bit too pat, but to those people I point out the dead bird. How on earth does an artist show a girl leaving flowers by a dead bird without tripping headlong into the trite or pat? I’ve no idea. All I know is that Smith manages it.

Much of this has to do with the quality of the art. Smith’s tone is simultaneously serious and chock full of a kind of everyday wonder. His city is not too clean, not too dirty, and just the right bit of busy. For all that it’s a realistic urban setting, there’s something of the city child to its buzz and bother. A kid who grows up in a busy city finds a comfort in its everyday bustle. There are strangers here, sure, but there’s also a father who may be distracted but is never any more than four or five feet away from his daughter. Her expressions remain muted. Not expressionless, mind you, but you pay far more attention to her actions than her emotions. What she is feeling she’s keeping to herself. As for the panels, Smith knows how to break up each page in a different way. Sometimes images will fill an entire page. Other times there will be panels and white borders. Look at how the shelves in a secondhand shop turn the girl and her dad into four different inadvertent panels. Or how the dead bird sequence can be read top down or side-to-side with equal emotional gut punches.

The placement of each blossom deserves some credit as well. Notice how Smith (or was it Lawson?) chooses to show when the flowers are bestowed. You almost never see the girl place the flowers. Often you only see them after the fact, as the bird or dog or mother remains the focus of the panel and the girl hurries away. The father is never bedecked, actually. He seems to be the only person in the story who isn’t blessed by the gifts, but that’s probably because he’s a stand-in more than a parent. For adults reading this book, he’s a colorless reason not to worry about the girl’s capers. His purpose is to help her travel across the course of the book. Then, at the end, she takes the last remaining daisy, tucks it behind her ear, and walks onto the back endpapers where the pattern changes from merely a lovely conglomeration of flower and bird images to a field. A field waiting to be explored.

The use of color is probably the detail the most people will notice, even on a first reading of the story. In interviews Lawson has said that folks have told him that the girl’s hoodie reminds them of Peter in The Snowy Day or Little Red Riding Hood. She’s a spot of read traveling through broken gray. Her flowers are always colorful, and then there are those odd little blasts of color along her path. The dress of a woman at a bus stop is filled with flowers of its own. The oranges of a fruit stand beckon. The closer the girl approaches her home, the brighter the colors become. That grey wash that filled the lawns in the park turn a sweet pure green. As the girl climbs the steps to her mother (whose eyes are never seen), even her dad has taken a rosy hue to his cheeks.

After you pick up your 400th new baby book OR story about an animal that wants to dance ballet OR tale of a furry woodland creature that thinks that everyone has forgotten its birthday, you begin thinking that all the stories that could possibly be told to children have been written already. Do not fall into this trap. If Sidewalk Flowers teaches us nothing else it is that a single child could inspire a dozen picture books in the course of a single hour, let alone a day. There’s a reason folks are singing this book’s praises from Kalamazoo to Calgary. It’s a book that reminds you why we came up with the notion of wordless picture books in the first place. Affecting, efficient, moving, kind. Lawson’s done the impossible. He wrote poetry into a book without a single word, and you wouldn’t have it any other way.

On shelves March 17th.

Source: Final copy sent from publisher.

Like This? Then Try:

• Big Red Lollipop by Rukhsana Khan – For another picture book about grace.
• Knuffle Bunny by Mo Willems – For a tale of a girl and her father out for a walk in the city.
• The Silver Button by Bob Graham – For a tale that matches this one in terms of small city moments and tone.

Blog Reviews: Nine Kinds of Pie

Professional Reviews: A star from Kirkus

Interviews: Roger Sutton talks with JonArno Lawson about the book.

Misc: I can’t be the only person out there who thought of this comic after reading this book.

The sumptuous cloth cover and unfurling clouds swirling across the end pages indicate something special about Elise Hurst’s latest picture book, Imagine a City. You’ll recognise Hurst’s illustrations from her other picture books such as The Night Garden, Flood and The Midnight Club to name a few. Imagine a City is a glorious collection of […]

Fox’s Garden
By Princesse Camcam
Enchanted Lion Books
ISBN: 978-1-59270-167-4
$14.95
Ages 3-6
On shelves now.

Have you ever read a picture book multiple times, enjoying it with each and every read, and then find later that it was wordless . . . and you didn’t even notice? Now THAT is the mark of an effective title. The publisher Enchanted Lion Books prides itself on its “Stories Without Words” series, and deservedly so. They import wordless picture books from abroad, format them into these long, slender books, and subsequently prove to the world that good storytelling is universal. It goes beyond language. The latest in this long line of beauties is, to my mind, the most impressive offering to date. Fox’s Garden by author Princesse Camcam (who edges out Sara Pennypacker, Mary Quattlebaum, and Robert Quackenbush in the Best Children’s Author’s Name contest) is ostensibly a very simple story about kindness and unexpected rewards. Combined with remarkable cut paper scenes that are lit and photographed in an eerie, wonderful way, this is a book that manages to simultaneously convey the joy that comes after a simple act of kindness as well as the feel and look of winter, night and day.

On a cold and windy night, when the snow blows in high drifts, a single fox plunges onward. When a warm, inviting village appears in a valley she makes her way there. However, once there she is summarily rejected by the hostile townspeople, at last taking refuge in a small greenhouse. A small boy spots the fox’s presence and goes to offer her some food. When he finds her, he sees that she is not alone. Newborn kits suckle, so he leaves the edibles at a safe distance and goes inside to bed. In the early morn the fox and her brood prepare to leave but before doing so they leap through the boy’s window, planting flowers in his floor so that he wakes up to a wonder of blossoms of his very own.

The fact of the matter is that I’ve seen cut paper work in picture books before, whether it’s the scale models in books like Cynthia von Buhler’s But Who Will Bell the Cats? or the distinctive Lauren Child style of The Princess and the Pea. But books of that sort are part cut paper and part dollhouse, to a certain extent, since they utilize models. Titles that consist of cut paper and lighting alone are rarities. Even as I write this it sounds like such a technique would be some fancy designer’s dream and not something appealing to kids. Yet what makes Camcam’s style so appealing is that it combines not just technical prowess but also good old-fashioned storytelling. The glow that emanates from behind some of the homes in the snowy winter village looks infinitely appealing. You can practically feel the heat that would strike you as you entered through one of those doorways. Even more impressive to me, however, was the artist’s ability to capture winter daytime cloudy light. You know that light I’m talking about. When snow has blanketed the earth and the white/gray clouds above give off this particular winter gleam. I’m used to complimenting illustrators on how well they portray winter light in paint. I’m less accustomed to praising that same technique in sliced up paper.

The shape of the book itself is an interesting choice as well. The publisher Enchanted Lion specializes in these long thin books, so I wasn’t quite sure if the book originally published (under the name “Une rencontre”) in the same format. To my mind it feels as though it was always intended to look this way. Just watching where the gutter between the two pages falls is an interesting exercise in and of itself. The first two-page spread shows the fox struggling, belly low, through snowdrifts. She’s on the right-hand page, the desolate woods behind her. When she spots the village she is on the left page and the town looks warm and inviting on the opposite side. Distant, because of the nature of the layout, but comforting. Interestingly the only time the two pages show two different scenes is when you see people kicking and yelling at the fox. In contrast to the rest of the book the two different images make everything feel tense and angry. Landscapes are calming. From there on in everything is a two-page spread, sometimes presenting a close-up shot (there is an amazing image of the happy fox in the foreground on the left page, while the boy is in the distant doorway of the greenhouse on the right) and sometimes an image of distance, as with the final shot.

It isn’t just the art that had me fail to recognize that the book was wordless. Camcam’s vixen seems to tell whole stories with just a glance here and there. She’s a proud animal. You understand that even as she’s kicked and cursed she’s retaining her dignity. The boy’s act of kindness may be given because he sees a creature in need, but it seems as though it’s just as likely that he’s helping her because she is worth worshipping anear. And though she and her brood do something particularly un-foxlike near the end she is, for the most part, not anthropomorphized. The storytelling sounds so oddly trite when I summarize the book, but it doesn’t feel trite in the least. You could easily see this book adapted into a ballet or similar wordless format. It’s a naturally beautiful tale.

Let’s examine that word for a second. Beautiful. I don’t use it enough when I’m describing picture books. It’s not the kind of word you should bandy about for no reason. If I called every other book “beautiful” it would diminish the importance of the word and I couldn’t use it when something as truly stunning as this. It’s the kind of book that doesn’t feel like anything else you’ve seen or read. True and lovely and entirely unique. A book to borrow and a book to own.

On shelves now.

Source: Final copy sent from publisher for review.

Like This? Then Try:

• The Snow Day by Komako Sakai
• The Cat Who Wouldn’t Come Inside by Cynthia von Buhler
• The Fox and the Crow by Manasi Subramaniam

Professional Reviews: A star from Kirkus

Misc: You can see a whole mess of spreads from the book over at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

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!

Wordless picture books contain only pictures and little or no text. They depend entirely on carefully sequenced illustrations to present the story. The illustrations must be highly narrative.

Although wordless picture books are generally aimed at preschoolers (aged 4 to 6), some of them are also intended for older children because they contain complex plot structures, subtle imagery, and sophisticated tone.

Can a wordless book be effective in helping children to learn a language?

“Definitely!” says Dawn Jeffers publisher at Raven Tree Press. ”Wordless picture books and picture books with limited words are both beautiful and educational. They help children develop language, creative thinking and enhance future reading and writing skills. Using wordless picture books, children learn that reading follows a left-to-right pattern. They learn that stories generally have a beginning, a middle section and an ending. They also learn to identify details, see cause and effect, make judgements and draw conclusions.”

Educators are using them to teach writing to children and also to help teach non-English speaking kids English. These are some of the reasons publishers have gravitated to “Wordless Picture Books.”

Lucy Cummins & Alexandra Cooper ran a Wordless Picture Book Workshop at the June 2012 NJ-SCBWI Conference. I asked Diana Patton if she would write up something to share with you.

Here’s Diana:

Art Director Lucy Cummins and Senior Editor Alexandra Cooper at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers ran an enjoyable workshop/talk. They worked as a well-oil machine and worked brightly and efficiently together to present us with lots of good information dotted with generous amounts of humor.

They discussed the characteristics of wordless picture books:

1. Story is easily understood in sequence.
2. Story has a real beginning, a middle, and an end.
3. They speak to a universal experience.
4. Different people can interpret the same book differently.
5. The story guides the reader gently but allows the reader to create their own narrative.
6. The story has boundless appeal.
7. Great page turns.
8. They can be “read” by people who speak any language.
9. Characters whose thoughts and actions “read” very clearly.
10. Story that is full of emotion.
11. Story should be deceptively obvious.

If you don’t need dialogue, if there are lots of active verbs, you may have a wordless picture book in you.

Why do some books work wordlessly?

Alex and Lucy shared excellent examples of this genre of purely visual storytelling and excellent examples of sequential storytelling . We saw:

Peggy Rathmann’s Goodnight, Gorilla
Alexandra Day’s Good Dog, Carl
Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman.
Chris Raschka’s A Ball for Daisy, the 2012 Caldecott Winner
David Wiesner’s FLOTSAM
Jerry Pinkney’s The Lion and the Mouse (also Caldecott Winners 2007 and 2010)
Barbara Lehman’s The Red Book (Caldecott Honor Book)

Pinkney’s The Lion and the Mouse is the awesomely beautiful retelling of an old tale; Lucy emphasized that if you retell a tale, you must have a new take on it. She recommended reading Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and his Making Comics (interestingly enough, my youngest son Shawn, the game designer, had already given me these books to study!)

Both Lucy and Alexandra stressed the importance of page turners. And of course, they discussed the reasons why your story might be told wordlessly. There should be an element of universality. For example, your imagination runs away with you, or you take a tale everyone knows and do a role r

Children beware -- you may not want to leave your sled outside at night. Or maybe you should. A forest creature might snatch the sled up one winter evening, take it for a joy ride and return it with a thanks, leaving only a few tracks outside to tell of the adventure. One can hope!

Lita Judge is one of our newest favorite author/illustrators. She grew up enjoying wintery weather and, according to her latest book, Red Sled, as a child she often wondered about the tracks left behind by the woodland animals. Judging from the animals' expressions in the book it appears she also knows a thing or two of the joys (and perils) of sledding downhill.

Red Sled is a nearly wordless picture book that shows the events that occur when a child leaves a red sled propped against the side of a home. A bear wanders by, notices the sled and sneaks away with it, scrunch, scrinching through the snow. The bear invites a rabbit friend for a fun, moonlight ride. As the sled flies downhill, other animals pile on one-by-one, gadung, gadunging on the snowy surface together while making gleeful noises. The impromptu sledding party results in smiles shared by all.

The illustrations in this endearing book are truly remarkable, from the animals' exuberant expressions to the little boy's wonderment at the tracks found near his sled. My kids giggle with delight at all the silly sledding antics and the faces the animals make. The adorable, bundled-up, red-hatted child reminds us of the classic character in Keats' The Snowy Day. The text consists only of a few joyful utterances and onomatopoeias like "sssssffft" for the sound the sled makes as it glides across the snow. The wordless silence punctuated by random sounds is a perfect textual interpretation of a sledding experience. Judge's Red Sled so beautifully captures the exhilaration of a sledding adventure that you'll want to immediately head to your favorite sledding hill!

Red Sled by Lita Judge. Atheneum Books for Young Readers (November 2011); ISBN 9781442420076; 40 pages
Book Source: Copy from public library

I've featured a number of wordless picture books on my blog, but the truth is wordless picture books weren't really on my radar before I had kids. However, after having kids I quickly realized the value of a book without words. Wordless picture books provide a wonderful tool to encourage interaction while reading together. They also help young children develop their oral communication skills and heighten their observation skills. Elementary-aged kids can use the books as a writing tool and write their own story to accompany the illustrations.

One of our favorite new wordless picture books is Where's Walrus? by Stephen Savage. My preschool-age son has wanted to "read" this walrus book nearly every day for the past month!

Where's Walrus? by Stephen Savage. Scholastic Press (February 2011); ISBN 9780439700498; 32 pages
Book Source: Copy from public library

All is quiet and peaceful at the zoo but Walrus apparently needs a change of pace. He decides to escape from the confines of the boring zoo and explores the city, careful to remain hidden from a searching zookeeper who tries to discern Walrus's whereabouts. To disguise himself Walrus literally tries on all sorts of different "hats," different life experiences. He blends in with firefighters, cabaret dancers, painters and more. Eventually he plunges headfirst into a perfect opportunity.

First of all, the design and straightforward illustrations in this book are fantastic. The uncluttered images and bold clean lines show off Savage's stellar graphic design talents and look modern and retro at the same time. Although Walrus tries to blend into various scenes, he's ridiculously and joyously easy to find (for all except the zookeeper...all those hats sure trick him). Kids won't have any problems spotting Walrus in the pictures, thus no frustration. In fact, when reading the book, my kids point out ways walrus could better camouflage himself. Did Walrus escape the zoo with a plan in mind or did he just luck out in life? Guess Savage leaves that part of the story up to the reader's imagination.

Related Links:
Stephen Savage - Website
Stephen Savage - Twitter