It's A Secret! by John Burningham

Every night Marie-Elaine’s cat, Malcolm, goes out, and every morning he comes back in and sleeps. "Where do cats go at night?" the girl wonders. So when she sees him at his cat door dressed to the nines, she begs to come along. And amazingly, Malcolm agrees — as long as she puts on her fancy clothes, gets small, and keeps it all a secret. With a whimsical story and breathtaking artwork, the acclaimed John Burningham takes us on an exciting night’s journey, braving hoodlum dogs and precarious climbs for a rooftop party that is cause for celebration indeed.

My favorite read-aloud of the week, I read this book to 2nd and 3rd Graders. Wryly worded, positively appealing -- it was a joy to read (over and over) and share.

Everybody Needs a Rock Third Grade Looks and Draws

   

Fly, Eagle, Fly! retold by Christopher Gregorowski, illustrated by Niki Daly

398.2 GRE

This story is based on an African tale often told by Dr. Aggrey, a West African missionary. A farmer finds an eagle chick and puts it in the coop with his chickens, where it learns to live like a chicken and, as the farmer insists, it even “thinks like a chicken.” A friend tries three times to persuade the young eagle to fly: “You belong not to the earth but to the sky”. But his first two attempts to launch the bird into flight do not succeed. Eventually, he takes the eagle (and the protesting farmer) up a mountain. There, “feeling the updraft of a wind more powerful than any man or bird,” the eagle sweeps up into the sky, “never again to live among the chickens”.


Fly, Eagle, Fly! was widely acclaimed when it was first published in 1982. Financial constraints at that time allowed illustrator Niki Daly to use only two colors, but even so his black-and-yellow ochre pictures were stunning. Republished in 2000, he created new full-color artwork with larger pages, and the result is one of the classics of South African children’s literature. With a powerful message of rising above one’s imposed earthly restrictions, the pictures are equally inspiring with their authentic portrayal of the South African landscape. The characters are richly alive, and colorful printed cloths brighten the village street where chickens scratch in the sun. The muted colors of the mountain are contrasted against the glowing sky at dawn. Fly, Eagle, Fly! was awarded the SACBF Vivian Wilkes Award for 2000 and was nominated as a South African IBBY Honour Book for illustration. The book includes a foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Questions, Questions by Marcus Pfister

In an age when infinite answers are available in an instant, maybe the questions we ask are what matter most. "There's so much that I want to know," writes Pfister, and in 13 short couplets he shows readers how questioning is a genuinely creative act—a way of being fully engaged in the world. His verses are by turns fanciful ("Do apple seeds dream happily/ of growing up to be a tree?"), scientifically minded ("What turns the leaves from green to brown/ and sends them floating gently down?"), and even faith-based ("Who teaches butterflies to fly,/ splashing their colors through the sky?"). Pfister has created images as pithy as they are poignant, boldly graphic and dramatically cropped against white backgrounds. A blue-headed songbird is reminiscent of Asian watercolor; a storm cloud looks like it's been fashioned from salt dough; falling leaves seem cut from pieces of thickly tufted carpet. Although each was created using the same painted paper method (explained on the final page), the results are as varied as the questions. Ages 3–up.

The Moon Jumpers by Janice May Udry pictures by Maurice Sendak

E UDR

Four years before Where the Wild Things Are won the Caldecott Medal, Maurice Sendak produced some of his most spectacular artwork for The Moon Jumpers. Printing technology has greatly improved since this enchanting picture book was first released more than fifty years ago, and now, with new color separations, the reproduction of Maurice Sendak's artwork comes closer to his stunning originals than ever before. Sendak's wondrous starry skies and Janice May Udry's evocative text immediately transport us back to cool, moonlit nights and fill us with the universal warmth of childhood. The Moon Jumpers' timeless beauty and inspiration earned it a Caldecott Honor in 1960 and will surely gather a new generation of fans.

My Map Book by Sara Fanelli

E FAN

In each spread of this bold and humorous picture book, children can examine their place in the world around them through detailed and engaging maps that are drawn from a child's perspective. Twelve beautifully illustrated maps such as Map of My Day and Map of My Family will fascinate children, teaching both about mapping and autobiography. 

Ah-hA to Zig-Zag by Maira Kalman

E KAL

As a lover of imaginative and intelligent alphabet books and of absolutely everything Maira Kalman does, I find the letters of the alphabet and the words they make insufficient to express the boundless wonderfulness of Kalman’s Ah-Ha to Zig-Zag — the children’s-book counterpart of her magnificent My Favorite Things, which began as a companion to an exhibition Kalman curated to celebrate the anticipated reopening of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

In this ABC gem — which doubles as a design-history primer full not of snobbery and self-important art-speak but of a playful celebration of uncertainty and imperfection — Kalman culls thirty-one objects from the museum’s collection and strings them together into a tour of the alphabet, with her characteristic quirk, candor, and exuberant creative curiosity as the loving guide.

Maria Popova/Brain Pickings

The Memory of an Elephant An Unforgettable Journey by Sophie Strady, Illustrated by Jean-François Martin

REF E STR

The Memory of an Elephant: 

A Most Unusual Children’s Book for Lovers of Mid-Century Modern Design   

Psychologists believe that our capacity for creative work hinges on our memory and the ability to draw on our mental catalog of remembered experiences and ideas. More than that, memory is our lifeline to our own selves. Indeed, can there be anything more central to identity than memory?

The Memory of an Elephant: An Unforgettable Journey is a most unusual picture-book by writer Sophie Strady and illustrator Jean-François Martin. Unusual not because it measures an impressive 15 inches in height — though that alone makes it a kind of enchanting narrative poster — but because it blends the fascination of encyclopedic curiosity with deep questions about memory, identity, and what makes a life worthwhile.

Marcel is a soulful old elephant who sets out to write an encyclopedia as his legacy. Having seen the Eiffel Tower built in 1889 and the first iMac introduced in 1998, and having filled the century between with a long lifetime of adventures and successes of his own, he undertakes “the enormous task of listing — in an enormous, illustrated encyclopedia — everything he’s learned throughout his long and exceptional life.”

But just as he is about to begin looking back on his many years and drawing on his vast memory-bank of knowledge, he finds his living room — his dedicated environment essential for writing, charmingly populated by iconic mid-century modern furniture and some unmistakable Eames designs — flooded with “a mountain of parcels wrapped in bright and patterned paper,” surprise birthday presents from his friends.

As he opens each package and plays with the present inside, the double meaning of the word “present” reveals itself. Marcel is transported to his past and the many lives compressed into his long and accomplished existence — his days as a world-famous musician, his stint as a sailor, his sabbatical in Vietnam, his time tending to the beautiful Luxembourg Gardens, his accidental participation in France’s historic Mai 1968 worker strikes and civil unrest.

Marcel comes upon the last unopened package, a large cardboard tube. Inside, he finds a poster that reads: “In May, we’ll have our way.” As he begins to ponder the strange time-travel quality of what sounds like a political slogan from the 1968 riots, he suddenly realizes it is actually May 1, the date of his birthday. Just then, his friends emerge from behind his elegant furniture for a proper birthday surprise.

The main story is peppered with curious encyclopedic asides both about elements of Marcel’s memories, from music to technology, and about elephants themselves — we learn that an elephant sleeps very little at night, “usually standing, always on alert,” and takes standing naps throughout the day; that an adult elephant needs to drink 30 gallons of water a day and eat between 220 and 440 pounds of food depending on the season; that an elephant can’t jump and must have one foot on the ground at all times; that despite an enormous weight of about five tons, an elephant makes no noise while walking.

The Memory of an Elephant: An Unforgettable Journey is immeasurably delightful from cover to giant cover, a warmhearted story sprinkled with subtle surprises for young readers and grownup design-lovers alike.

Maria Popova 

Brain Pickings

Nancy Knows by Cybèle Young

E YOU

Nancy knows she's forgotten something. Something important. When she tries to remember, she thinks of all kinds of other things instead. She remembers things she knows and things she doesn't quite know. She remembers things one way, then another. Sometimes she remembers with her ears or her stomach or even her heart. But Nancy knows she's still forgetting something. It's only when Nancy stops thinking altogether that she finally remembers the very important thing she's forgotten. Nancy Knows is the charming story of an elephant who remember lots of things, except the very thing she is trying to remember. Each spread of this whimsical, arresting picture book features fantastic miniature paper sculptures within expressive outlines of a puzzled pachyderm. It's a book not to be forgotten.

---amazon.com

Turtle's Penguin Day by Valeri Gorbachev

E GOR

Turtle is so excited by the book about penguins that his dad reads him at bedtime that he decides he wants to be a penguin. So the next morning, he creates a penguin costume, grabs his book, and heads for the schoolbus. His kindergarten classmates are thrilled. They all want to be penguins too! Turtle shows his book to his teacher, and all day long he and his classmates do as the penguins do—they slide down the slide on their bellies during recess, form a waddling conga line at music time, and snack on goldfish crackers. It's a super-cool penguin day! This delightful picture book from Valeri Gorbachev is a perfect blueprint for teachers (and kids) to plan penguin days of their own.

Daniel Pinkwater

Daniel, Age 7

E PIN
I Was A Second Grade Werewolf

In Daniel Manus Pinkwater's books you'll meet fat men from outer space, music-making lizards, a 200-pound chicken and other wonderfully crazy characters. While Pinkwater's books are outrageously humorous, he also has the uncanny ability to reach young readers by writing about his own childhood experiences. 

FIC PIN

I (Miss Nancy) read this one a few days before Halloween -- I agree with the reviewers quoted below!

"No author has ever captured the great fun of being weird, growing up as a happy mutant, unfettered by convention, as well as Pinkwater has. When I was a kid, Pinkwater novels like Lizard Music...made me intensely proud to be a little off-center and weird — they taught me to woo the muse of the odd and made me the happy adult I am today.  The NYRB edition of Lizard Music is a beautiful... hardcover, a testament to Pinkwater's influence on generations of readers. It's one of those books that, in the right hands at the right time, can change your life for the better and forever."  —Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing

“Lizard Music is. . . funny, properly paranoid, shot through with bad puns and sweet absurdities, and all about a baffled kid intent on tracking reality (as slippery as lizards) in a media-spooked milieu.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Wildly imaginative. . . . This is a natural high.” —Booklist (starred review)