Where're ya at?

Or, where am I at? Short answer: having a cold, watching Brokeback Mountain, taking care of cat dying from lung cancer. Geez, that short answer's pretty depressing. On to other topics.

Now seems like a good time to write up a few of the new picture books that OlderKid and I have been enjoying. First let me say a hearty congratulations to Chris Raschka for the Caldecott winner The Hello Goodbye Window. I'm a big fan of Raschka's work (in particular Yo! Yes!) and the new one keeps up his tradition of amazingly vibrant illustrations of interracial relationships. It's a great book for mixed families of course, but also for families of all kinds. I can't give a full review, however, since I've only read this book in a Barnes and Noble, and am currently waiting for a promised signed first edition. (Thanks, Mom!)

Instead, I'll briefly talk about five books that are in heavy rotation in OlderKid's bedtime reading ritual. (Point of clarification: OlderKid is almost 3, so really only Older in a relative sense. Some of these are definitely over his head, but that doesn't seem to bother him.) Traction Man is Here! concerns the adventures of a certain action figure in a hilariously messy British household. His run-ins with various malevolent household objects (the Poisonous Dishcloth, wicked Professor Spade, etc.) are both imaginative and perfectly reasonable. The shifting point-of-view captures exactly the freedoms of children's play. Clara and Asha comes from Caldecott-winner Eric Rohman and concerns a girl's fantasy adventures with a giant flying fish...the artwork treads a narrow line between luminous and twee and just occasionally veers into the latter. From the author-illustrator of the Henry series of books (not, full disclosure, favorites of mine) comes Eddie's Kingdom, a story of a young boy who seeks to heal his divided apartment building through his allegorical drawing of the residents as animals in the Peaceable Kingdom. There are lots of neat visual references here, and the artwork appeals to me intellectually, but I'm still not totally sold on D. B. Johnston's cubist style. Finally, speaking of intellectually satisfying art, there's Paul Zelinsky's retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, not a new book but new to us. The Renaissance style illustrations match perfectly with the vaguely creepy text (why does the King love gold so much? For that matter, why does he have so many rooms in his castle filled with straw?) to create a satisfyingly unsettling read. OlderKid took a little while to warm up to this, but now he asks for it all the time, and has been heard to mutter Rumpelstiltskin's parting retort--"The Devil told you that!"--to himself on several occasions.
On that note--back to Braudel.