CHILDREN'S BOOKSELLER // BOOK REVIEWER // ELEMENTARY SCHOOL LIBRARIAN = WORKING WITH CHILDREN & CHILDREN'S BOOKS SINCE 1995
Goodnight Everyone by Chris Haughton
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Goodnight Everyone is the fourth picture book by Chris Haughton I have reviewed since 2010 when he became a fast favorite. Haughton's unique palette of colors, not often seen in picture books, combined with his lovable, if sometimes hapless characters and clever stories make him an author and illustrator worth following. With Goodnight Everyone, Haughton has created a picture book that is sure to make readers and listeners yawn alike and also make you look at the night sky a bit more closely.
The endpapers of Goodnight Everyone show the southern and northern night skies on one side of the page and the planets in our galaxy, along with which part of the earth is experiencing day and night, on the other. You will definitely find yourself returning to these pages.
The sun is going down and the eyes of the forest animals are drooping. The first few pages of Goodnight Everyone are cut and layered to reveal the animals falling asleep, from mice to bears, with each page turn, the size of the page increasing with the size of the animals. Baby bear, like most small children, resists the call to sleep, but eventually succumbs. While Goodnight Everyone may seem like a sweet and simple story at first, multiple readings (and you WILL be asked to read this book over and over) reveal the many subtle wonders of Haughton's visual story telling skills. As the story unfolds and night falls, the palette darkens gradually. In the layered page spread at start of the book, the grass at the bottom of the pages darkens gradually with every turn. And, the final spread where we see all the forest animals asleep reveals the northern night sky with a spread of constellations, accurately displayed, as the end papers confirm. Another superb picture book from a rising star.
Be a Tree! by Maria Gianferrari illustrated by Felicita Sala Review Copy from Abrams Kids I picture-walked Be a Tree! three times before I actually read the words. Felicita Sala's illustrations for Maria Gianferrari's poetic text are mesmerizingly immersive and richly colorful within a palette of earth tones. Throughout the text, Gianferrari, who shares her inspiration for this book in the author's note ( Peter Wohleben's The Hidden Life of Trees ), gently maintains the human connection to trees and the connections (and communications) trees share with each other. Be a Tree! begins exuberantly, inviting the reader to "Be a tree! Stand tall. Stretch your branches to the sun. Let your roots curl, coil in the soil to ground you." From your spine/trunk to your skin/bark and your heart/pith, the words carry you inward and then zoom outward and up to the canopy and ultimately, the forest. "You are one of many trees," and our roots "twine with fung
Under Earth , Under Water by Aleksandra Mizielińska and Daniel Mizieliński is their fourth book I have reviewed here and their fourth book with the marvelous Big Picture Press , a publisher of oversized, highly illustrated, gorgeous books who believe that books should be "visually intelligent, surprising, and accessible to readers of all ages, abilities and nationalities." BPP definitely achieves this with every book they publish and, if you are a book lover, you will want to seek out all their titles. Under Earth , Under Water will appeal to anyone who likes to look inside things and understand how things work. With Under Earth, Under Water , the Mizielińskis, who have an illustration style that is filled with tiny details and a unique palette, take readers on a detailed journey, from the top of the page to the bottom, over and under land and then sea. The endpapers serve as the introduction and table of contents, with images scattered across the spread, page nu
While I wrote an article titled Reading Levels: How I Assign Reading Levels to Books, How the Publishers Do It and How You Can Help Your Reader Find the Right Book at the Right Time that discusses how reading levels are determined by professionals and amateurs like myself, there is more on this subject to discuss. Determining the reading level of a book from the children's section is never easy, mostly because there are several different standardized methods of determining reading levels. Add to this the fact that knowing their children's reading level is most often the only tool a parent is armed with when exploring the bookstore, library, website, etc, and the job becomes even more difficult. While I think that knowing a child's reading level is a very valuable tool if your child is reading below grade level, I think that it is a secondary consideration when finding books for children reading above, especially well above, grade level because, in most cases, content app