MORE 'REVIEWS-2019' POSTS
There are books for kids that dare to be more thoughtful than pulse pounding. If chosen freely by a child, they can unlock something inside. Something that means more to the person reading than anyone else. The Line Tender carries this promise in its pages. It's the right book for the right reader.
The Girl and the Wolf by Métis author Katherena Vermette and Cree- Métis artist Julie Flett, is an original fairytale in the purest sense of the term. Essentially, it takes a European idea and flips it on its head. A book that cracks the limitations of the fairy tale form wide open.
Here’s an idea: Why not take the idea of a world gone mad and give it a jolt of lightning to the veins? Set your book in another era when America went a little crazy, then liven things up with spies, car chases, murder attempts, gunshots, traitors, double agents, and that’s just the first few chapters! A book for the kids that want to read a response to our age that will thrill them to the core, and maybe plant a couple of seeds of rebellion in their craniums at the same time.
You have other books about emotions that you love, I have no doubt, but seriously consider supplementing them with Rash’s latest. A loving little book unafraid to be happy, sad, angry, scared, and supremely good.
Simler has previously wowed American audience with such books as Plume and the magnificent The Blue Hour. Now, thanks in part to the elegant translation by Sarah Ardizzone, she has crafted a new kind of bedtime book. One rooted in poetry, dreams, seasons, fuzzy noses, lilting words, and a type of scratch art never before made possible.
Gracefully switching between text and comics, comics and text, author Remy Lai feeds breadcrumbs (or, more accurately, cake crumbs) of humor and sequential art to kids, luring them towards a storyline with a deeper, darker meaning. For the kid that avoids serious stories like the plague, Pie in the Sky is the perfect gateway drug.
Want to look at Cinderella through the mores of the 21st century? I suggest pairing yourself up with an artist that’s been dead for 80 years. Why it’s so crazy, it just might work.
Kwame Alexander’s words are grand. Kadir Nelson’s art soars. But when you put those two things together, and they work in tandem, they bring out the best in one another. Unrelenting, undeniable, unavoidable. Fail to read this book at your peril. I hope it is only the beginning.
There’s the usual historical, factual stuff . . . and then there’s the pure science fiction. Books like We’re Not From Here by Geoff Rodkey. Unapologetically bold, it wears its little science fiction loving heart on its sleeve. Managing to also be funny and strangely poignant, this isn’t a book about “Why can’t we all just get along?” It’s about what happens when our differences are so glaring we have no choice but to acknowledge that they’re there at all.
A bit of art, a bit of text, this title typifies picture books at their best. Bold and small and gutsy and quiet. A title you could easily miss, but why would you want to?