I am so delighted to be introducing today's video review. In this book of rhyming poetry, Calef Brown takes us on a wild romp through his imagination using vivid contemporary surreal language. The illustrations in  "Polka Dot Bats and Octopus Slacks: 14 Stories" are as outrageous as the text with fun and fascinating color combinations, wild compositions and shapes, and painterly moves.

Two big takeaways in this:

1. If you can let your imagination go really far out, you can create a thing of wonder and joy (though of course you need the craft to back it up).
2. As I often tell my students, you can create any universe you like, so long as it's consistent within that universe so it all fits together.
   

I am delighted to bring you this review of a book by my friend Jeri Chase Ferris. It is an innovative biography of Noah Webster and his words, showing and telling about his life and times and how he came to write the first school books and the first American dictionary. He was quite the character, Jeri engagingly demonstrates as  Noah follows his passion to unite the use of  American English as an act of patriotism and more. Because there is so much embedded in this fairly short book, I've focused the review primarily on Webster's lifelong quest to write his namesake dictionary and the art to keep my review short. Wonderful, playful illustrations complete and complement the story.

PS YouTube usually gives you 3 thumbnail images to choose from for the initial video still, but for some reason it insists on keeping this terrible mid-expression image, which is not reflective of my feelings about this book at all! At least it makes me laugh and it does show one of the delightful illustrations. Still struggling to get the lighting right in our new home.

This delightful concept book features a kind of call and response  in the form of question and answer to encourage interactivity. It is a light multicultural approach to cultural/language differences in describing animal sounds. Intrigued? I hope so. Written by Linda Sue park, "Mung Mung: A fold out book of animal sounds," is beautifully illustrated by Diane Bigda using soft brush work, graphic shapes, and mostly pastel colors.

I vaguely remember Oscar Wilde once wrote something about consistency being the hobgoblin of little minds, so in that spirit, I'm posting a video for Mondays with Mira on Wednesday that I made a while ago of a wonderful board book!!! And even tho it only has 2 words that are each repeated to make 4 words max. per spread, it is very far from boring. You'll learn a lot about board books and some of the many things that babies and toddlers need to learn to become socialized little people : ) The illustrations are also wonderful. I remembered it from a post I did on my new super dooper Facebook page Children's Book Creatives where we are having a lively discussion about books with few or no words that have the images tell the story. Do come join us!

Actually I just found the quote here http://tinyurl.com/aywfpn9 and it was Ralph Waldo Emerson who said that "consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Oscar Wilde backed him up, proclaiming, “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”' But then I read the comments, which point out that Emerson actually said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," which of course makes much more sense given how important consistency is is in creating a believable and consistent world in writing with a few twists and sparks thrown in : )

Oh and don't forget to come join the juicy conversations over at Children's Book Creatives and tell your friends!!

Now that our Internet is finally working again, I'm delighted to start the new year with a book that represents new beginnings seeing and appreciating things from a toddler's eyes.

In this review, I focus a lot on the highly stylized art and design. But the first person narrative is also fresh in the ways that it describes what a very young child didn't see or know about before it was born and what it sees now. This gives the story a lovely point of view or perspective that is both simple and charming while introducing different concepts that a young child or infant will want to learn about in lyrical language. The retro/contemporary art is delightful and a wonderful example of working with positive and negative shapes. I hope you enjoy the book as much as I do.

I wish you all the most wonderful year full of happiness, joy, creative fulfillment and the ability to see and experience the world and all the good things in it anew.