picture books

This book, like all the Jenni Desmond books we've had the chance to look at so far, is just wonderful. The illustrations are gorgeous, and the level of detail on the animals is perfection for young children, but still super interesting for adults (I always learn new things from these books)! The author uses lots of comparisons to make things easier to understand, and also a bit humorous, like saying that an average blue whale weights "around 160 tons, or about the same as a heap of 55 hippopotami" and shows a delightful illustration of this heap, or says that 50 people could fit inside a whale's mouth, and then depicts this. None of it is over the top or defaults to goofy in favor of a true sense of awe about the natural world. This blue whale book is one of our favorites of this particular series.

This book is a good way to introduce the terms for groups of animals, but in a way that makes it way more fun than just reading them off a list. The illustrations are silly, with sharks bundled up in hats and scarves, wolves packing suitcases, moles donning suits & hats, and bears investigating with magnifying glasses. You get the idea. There's a different scenario on each page, so it's not a narrative that continues from cover to cover, so it is a bit less engaging for a very young child than a book with more of a story, but mine (2yo) laughed a lot at what was obviously silly stuff. But we have had no requests for repeat reading. We will revisit the book in a few years when the collective words are more likely to stick.

I am clearly a huge fan of the genre of books that are essentially love letters to baby, and this has to be at the very top of the list for me in terms of perfection in the genre. I love absolutely everything about it. The illustrations are gorgeous, the words are beautiful and soaring and make you choke up when you read. It's just so, so very good. There is no language about sex/gender, so it should be suitable for any parents, though it does depict the narrator as the gestational parent and one line is "summer was fading into fall on the day I found out that you had chosen to make my body your first home." So, depending on the family, this book may not work, but I also think that it would be easy enough to change the line to "the day I found out you were going to join us at home" for other family structures. There's another line, "with each stitch, I whispered a prayer for you and thought about wrapping you up warm and safe, just like you are now in my belly" but the part about being the belly can be omitted, as well. Other than that, the rest of the text is completely suitable for any family welcoming a baby into their lives. I can't recommend this book highly enough.

This is probably our favorite Dr. Seuss book. The illustrations are more immersive than in most of Seuss's other books, and details span both pages of most page spreads. It is unlike the cover image where the artwork is floating in a white void, and the environments created are much more detailed and interesting and the whole book is just a feast for the eyes, even the illustrations that line the covers. So great. It's also got more complex and wordy and intricate rhymes, and we love them because you can always just speak every word in your natural cadence and the metering matches up at the end of every line with the one(s) with which it's meant to pair, with no extra effort, so it sounds natural. Lots and lots of made-up language, and super fun. It's a bit lengthy for a bedtime book, and so we have a bedtime version of reading it where we pick out a few salient lines from each page to read and skip the others, and that is a nice compromise when we're trying to hurry lights-out but little one definitely wants this book. Unlike many Dr. Seuss books, this one is not geared at very early readers, and that's one reason it's a bit more delightful to the adults who are tasked with reading it than many of the others that it's easier to tire of (haha, no pun intended).

We love this book! It is such an excellent book for subtle demonstration of perspective-taking. The ball is big to piggie, but to the whale, it's a little ball. The other thing that's nice is that the book is so lighthearted and fun, with no relational aggression demonstrated. The only problem I have with this (and all the Gerald & Piggie books), is that the "male" character has a name, whereas "Piggie" is just the name of the animal, so technically none of these books pass (the optional requirement for female characters to have names version of) the Bechdel test. Perhaps a small complaint, but it bears mentioning.

We so love this book, and really enjoy all the books in this series. It's worth noting that although these books are not specifically intended as early readers, they are very close to being suitable. The story in this book is so sweet: when Lulu's party does not go as she expects, her friends try to do their best to turn things around. We love the simple watercolor illustrations, and the characters are all very sweet and likeable.

So many rhyming books are so awkward and forced, so it's always a delight when a rhyming book flows so naturally that it sounds good effortlessly, the first time you read it, b/c you don't need to know ahead of time how to alter words from how you normally say them to make them fit into the space they've been questionably wedged. The rhymes in this are the kind of rhymes I don't mind, and even somewhat enjoy in a children's book. The character is Jack, "who said to his dad..." but you can also easily insert any caregiver b/c "dad" is mentioned only the once at the very beginning, and just a single pronoun shift can change Jack to "she" or "they". The art style is definitely not my most favorite, but it's enjoyable enough. It's a stylized, sleek, mid-century modern / astro / 60s style. And it works with the content in the book. One thing I really like about it is the spirit of the child not as a passive consumer, but an active creator of what their world can be like. The inside covers are full of labeled "sketches" of the child's made-up car designs.

This book has lovely watercolors that make you want to see very page, but also a nice, sweet story. It's perhaps not THE most memorable book of all times, but it wraps in a bit of a fable without feeling even a little bit preachy, but still feels like it reinforces a belief in the goodness of children, the value of caring, and the importance of staying present.

Children's books with nature poems are a very hit-or-miss genre, with many that keep neither my nor my 2yo's interest. Many books that succeed do so with extremely beautiful language that you melt into and feels sophisticated but not at all forced. This book isn't quite like that, but is more playful. The poetic text is brief enough to keep things moving along at a nice clip, but every page has sounds that approximate how the featured bird will sound, or a cadence that matches the rhythm of the bird's style. All of this with delightful, beautiful paintings. But it's deceptively simple. With beautiful illustrations (Jenni Desmond!), it's nice just to flip through and see the various birds, but it can be hard to create an engaging narrative that features many types of birds, right? Well, the author manages to keep young children interested who happen to like hearing an adult make funny sounds! Every page spread, in addition to some short but informative poem about the species being featured, has some kind of noise that is supposed to sound like a bird, and if you really get into it, really ham it up, it is quite fun. Examples of the "sounds"?: "tea-kettle! tea kettle!", "chit chit chit", "chi-tick! chi-tick!", "chew chew chew chew chew", "quirt-quirt-quirt-quirt", etc. Though with a dry style it can sound like just repeated words, you only have to make it a little playful and move through the book at a somewhat rapid pace and it really does start to sound like a bunch of different styles of birds are calling out from the book in your voice, which is actually fun b/c you would never have thought to try all those different ways of representing bird noises. Well, I didn't. The most we'd done before this book was, "chirp", "tweet", "caw", and "hoo", so this was a delightful expansion of that limited repertoire.

This book is a great opposites book. First got this when my child was ~18mo. It's easy enough to read to a very young child just describing obvious opposites. But the more complex ideas can start to reveal themselves in bits as the child gets older. My almost 2.5yo is starting to understand a bit of the theme about comparisons all being relative, but there are still that will take more time. The illustrations are sweet and simple with a limited color palette and style that make it feel vintage. It's just surprisingly good. It's not a book my 2yo regularly asks for, but periodically does, and then a spell passes before it rotates back in. My child picks up at least some new thing in each read.

This book is such a sweet look at a relationship between a young child and her grandma. The content isn't especially gendered, so it can certainly be read aloud to a young child with different/no gender assigned to characters. We happen to read it with Maud as a "he" and Grand-Maud as a "they". But the simplicity and tenderness of how much they enjoy their time together on each visit, it feels so real and enjoyable. The artwork is so gorgeous, too. Even if you think of it as a book you will read to a daughter or granddaughter about her grandma, it's nice that the book doesn't put female characters into tiny gendered boxes. And those who are artists will of course appreciate that Maud is a creator. Maud both paints and tells elaborate stories and plans to write books one day.

My 2yo loves this book just in general, and likes the journey to the market story and all the things the narrator explores. But it's definitely the favorite in the "color" books category. It's surprisingly challenging to find really worthwhile books about color. But this book does more than just that, because the exploration at the market feels like a fun adventure, and the imagery & vocabulary sticks in my 2yo's head. The narrator is unnamed and ungendered. Amma can be made genderless with omission of a pronoun just once or twice in the book.

This book is lovely and slow-paced and feels like an authentic description of being a young child going out into the moonlit snowy woods with a parent at night to look for an owl. The book happens to be about a child (gender unspecified) and their "Pa", but "Pa" can easily be subbed out in the story (which is what we do). This is a subtle book that captures the child's sense of awe at the first time being brought along with their parent on such an adventure, not just the "owling" itself, but specifically the child's excitement at being brought along, and what it was like to be excited and experience all these new things.

This is definitely one of those books that I clearly enjoy reading to my 2yo more than she enjoys hearing. But, even still, it is just one of the most beautiful books in the genre of "love song / love letter from parent to child". It's impossible not to be brought to tears by this, the nature imagery is powerful, the illustrations are hauntingly beautiful. I will keep reading it to my child through the years, and expect that the abstractness will resonate even more within a year or two, and become simply a sweet book my child loves to hear me read (and loves to steep in the visual beauty of). Also worth noting, this book is not specific to parents and children, let alone any gender. It could work for any caretaker of a child or adult of any age, as it just keeps saying "you belong" to the recipient of the message, but gives no detail about self or recipient.

This book is one of our favorites. The illustrations are just gorgeous and the story is sweet and also with a very subtle and gentle sense of humor. I like the moment when the pair are feeling upset with one another and express it as "I am not smiling at you" / "I am not smiling at you either". The kind of rupture and repair between the pair feels exactly like the emotions between children. They are being playful, and then, without meaning to, it goes too far, and they both reel, a little dramatically (but it's still conveyed gently), and then when they reconcile, the way their hearts soar feels so authentic. It's just such a special book. The way that they feel compelled to resort to grand gestures to repair also feels so sweet and child-like. I can't say enough good things about this book. We also like that it's a bit on the long side, with 3 shorter stories inside (though the stories flow into one another rather smoothly).

This book is sweet and imaginative and a great way to explore the urban environment. While 2yo couldn't fully appreciate yet, would like to check out again when she's older.

The artwork isn't for everyone, and isn't my favorite, but the text is beautiful and the science bits are accurate. Most of the artwork inside is very abstract marbling collages. This book will be better suited to a child who can understand a bit of abstraction (maybe 4-5yo), as it did not hold attention of a 2yo.

The illustration style isn't my favorite, but the message is SO SWEET and very important developmentally for children to know we love all of them, not just their best parts. To clarify, the book does not engage in name-calling. The child asks the question this way, "what if I was so smelly that my name was 'Stinky Face', would you still love me then?", and the parent in the book replies using the child's own language, which shows acceptance of the child and their fears. Also, the child is gender-non-specified, so this book is suitable for children of any gender with no modifications. The parent in the book is referred to as "mama".

This book is beautifully illustrated, and worth the look, but feels more like a random smattering of information than a book that was well-planned to teach the concepts it depicts. It would benefit from the content being re-ordered, with some additional process details included to sort of fill in what's missing. The pages that show the composition of a seed, its germination, and some timelines of various seeds, feel like it would work better at the beginning. It uses the word "germinate" at one point, but fails to first tell what germination means (which matters very little for a parent well-versed in the basics of plant biology / gardening). If you don't expect this book to teach the basic concepts of what a seed it and how it grows, but only see it as a book that shows a wide variety of different types of seeds doing their thing, with descriptions of their nuances, then this book is great. For a child who is in the earliest stages of being introduced to the concepts, this may leave the child a little confused. But the illustrations are so beautiful, it would make a lovely addition to a collection of books on the topic.

This book manages not to be a yawning hand-wavey addition to the genre. It's not perfect, but it's certainly worth a read. My 2yo wanted to read it over and over when we got it from the library. It's nice that the book decides to ask the question of what it means to be kind and to consider that our attempts to be kind may not always be received the way we expect. It still keeps it fairly light and very age-appropriate for very young children, but it takes the approach of trying to be a bit thoughtful, which is appreciated. I don't agree with every tiny detail, but don't see anything outright harmful. The one caveat is that the very first scene depicts a character, Tanisha, spilling grape juice on their dress, and it says, "Everyone laughed. I almost did, too. But Mom always tells me to be kind, so I tried." so it's not necessarily relational aggression (the children may have found it funny and reacted with laughter without the intent to hurt Tanisha) and it only lasts for this one scene before the book's main character has an internal dialogue about what it means to really be kind. So I feel it's not suffering from the problems of all the counterproductive "pro-social" content that just demonstrates to kids how to make someone feel rotten. You also get the feeling that Tanisha is more upset about the stained dress than about the other children's reactions. I also appreciate that the lead character is fully gender-neutral and the gender presentations (via illustrations) in the book don't feel so binary (of the 12 children illustrated on the page where they're laughing after the grape juice spill, I would characterize at least 5 of them as being fairly gender ambiguous).

I like that this book counts all the way up to 25 and shows what a collection of objects of that many looks like, with interesting and slightly bizarre ideas used for many of the pages. My 2yo quite enjoyed it. Great book for occasional reading from the library, though not one I feel we'd add to our permanent collection (it's a bit light on story, so once counting to 25 has been mastered, the book would most likely fail to maintain interest).

The illustrations are so lovely. I particularly like the pages where the polar bear is swimming along the surface of the water, looking so small with narwhals & then a whale swimming below. It is probably one of the most effective ways I've seen the scale of the sea creatures demonstrated effectively in a natural setting, where the paintings are just beautiful to look at. The story is a little bit abstract for a very young child, the way it's written. It would be helpful for the child to already have some background knowledge about the plight of polar bears and melting ice caps and whatnot. I also like that the book doesn't shy away from letting us know the polar bear eats seals, though it manages to do so while talking about how the polar bear must hunt without any graphic depictions, and then turns the tables later by showing that seals have the upper hand for part of the year. And it does have the requisite polar bear cubs scene (though a bit more would be nice for young children). This is a book to revisit from the library around 3yo.

A great book for the genre of books that talk about seasons and how animals cope. This is a genre my 2yo has come to quite enjoy. The poems in this are a bit hit-or-miss, with some that are really quite nice, but others are pretty forgettable. The artwork is all prints (lino & wood cuts) so it has a very unique feel to it and it's just nice for that reason, even though not every poem is a delight. We really enjoyed the fact that there's a snippet of (non-poem) informational text on each page spread with more details about the animals. I learned several interesting things!

Ahhh, I have such mixed feelings about this one! So, for any person who is an uber-nerd for all things aesthetic movement and arts & crafts movement, fans of Christopher Dresser and William Morris and who obsessively review the Bradbury & Bradbury wallpaper collection, and attend Craftsman Weekend in Pasadena, and have an entire bookcase filled with books surrounding this realm of interest, it's hard not be immediately in love with the book, as the adult reading it. But, I have to be honest and say that my 2yo didn't quite feel pulled in to the story. And I think the story is quite darling and imaginative, and think that if you don't grasp too hard at any specific meaning, it's a lovely little story. But I still find myself a smidge agitated by the fact that I am not sure whether this is a fantastical myth, or we're supposed to assume a natural phenomenon explanation (changing of the seasons, the canopy getting fuller & blocking out the sky) for the changes the fox experiences. At the end of the day, as beautiful as the book is, and as much as the nerd in me wants to own this book, I don't find it terribly compelling, and I'm not sure why, and that makes me a bit unhappy because I quite like *nearly* everything about it, so I feel a bit confused. Definitely one of those books you could turn into a postcard set.