Picture Book Sunday- Words and Writing

Ohi,Debbie Ridpath. I Want to Read All the Books
September 17, 2024 by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Copy provided by Young Adult Books Central

Hana has a question about the rain one day, and her mother gives her a book that might answer her questions. This opens up the floodgates, and the more Hana reads, the more questions she has. This encourages her to read more and more books! She reads all of the ones in her room, borrows some from her brother (who has the audacity to question her personal cleanliness while she is clearly ON A MISSION), and eventually reads all of the books in her house. This leads her to borrow from her two best friends, Luis and Mahtab, but even those are finished quickly. Her mother takes her to a local bookshop, but declines BUYING all the books. Instead, the two hit the local branch library, but even that doesn't take Hana long to go through the entire collection. Eventually, her mother takes her to a main branch of the library, and Hana is flabbergasted (she's also read the dictionary) by the sheer number of books. She's sad that she can't possibly read them all, but an understanding librarian gives her a couple of different ways to cope. Soon, Hana is recommending books to her mother, putting together a book discussion group, and learning that while she can't necessarily read ALL the books, she can certainly enjoy lots of them, learn from them, and create a community of readers who can share her love of the written word.

Well, Hana, it never occurred to me to read ALL the books, although I certainly do try! This reminded me of the time that my younger daughter brought home a worksheet from school where they had to count the number of windows, chairs, and other items in the house. When she came to books, she burst into tears! Young readers who love to be surrounded by books will start this book thinking that they will emulate Hana, and hopefully take away the message that it's not necessary or realistic to read all the books; enjoying the ones you do read is the best way to go.

I can't imagine how much time it took to draw all of the books in this, and there are a couple of clever shout-outs to the author's own titles. My favorite pictures were the ones of Hana's dog; the look on the little dog's face as a stuffed animal was sitting in a chair, and the depiction of the dog reading and joining in Hana's various adventures were delightful. Having small, clever things in the backgrounds to look for can be so much fun when reading along with a younger child.

The message that there is a lot to learn in the world, and that books are a great place to start is a good one that I wish my middle school students had internalized at a young age, and is a great one to deliver to early elementary school students. This would make a fantastic present to a grade school teacher, and would be great to read aloud before a visit to the school library, or if students are lucky enough, a field trip to the public library.

My only quibble is that Hana is reading through the entire branch library pretty quickly; it took me fifteen years to read just all of the fiction books in my school library. This is poetic license, of course, and seeing that Hana also reads the dictionary (raise your hands if this is you!), it's easy enough to forgive.

Bibliophiles love books about books and reading, and this should be at the top of that To Be Read pile that might also include Luna Loves Library Day by Coelho and Lumbers, Moose’s Book Bus by Moore, Miss Brooks Loves Books! (And I Don't) by Bottner and Emberley, and The Highest Mountain of Books in the World by Bonilla.

Dolan, Elys. How to Make a Picture Book
August 13, 2024 by Candlewick Press
Copy provided by Young Adult Books Central

Elys Dolan, who writes and illustrates picture books, offers tips and a process for creating stories in this amusing story and how to guide. Depicting herself as a worm (easier and quicker to draw!) with a blue bug named Bert as her assistant, Dolan goes through all of the essentials for creating a riveting tale and putting it into book format. From coming up with an idea, to interviewing your main character, to creating a setting, and finally plotting your story, all of the main ideas are carefully laid out. I also appreciated the activities that are suggested, and think they would be very helpful to young writers. After the story is finished, there are further suggestions for how to lay it out in a book, starting at deciding on a size and creating a booklet out of paper. From there, there are suggestions for two page spreads, boxes for illustrations, and even the colors to use for different moods. I love that the book ends with a book launch for Bert's book, Dino Pizza!

There is a lot of great information in this book that would have been really helpful to me in 1971, when Miss Gordon had up create stories. Of course, back in the day, we created covers by wrapping cereal box cardboard in wallpaper samples, so my book was resplendent in turquoise flocked paper! I am absolutely convinced that encouraging very young children to tell stories is helpful to their later abilities to write, and creating actual books is very motivating. This is helpful even for older students, who seem to have a lot of trouble following the stream of consciousness technique that Bert uses to come up with his dinosaur pizza or pigeon airways stories!

I enjoyed that this was also a story about writing a book, and think this is especially appealing to the younger children. I would almost like to see this reworked for older students with more of a clean cut, list format. The ideas are excellent, but older readers might not be as interested in Bert.

This reminded me a little of Kramer's Tell Me a Lion Story, another clever way to get children to think about story telling, and is a great book to add to books like Hanlon's Ralph Tells a Story, Barnett and Rex's How This Book Was Made and Pett's This is My Book. If your young writers want to know more about how professionally published books are put together, I have fond memories of Aliki's How a Book is Made (1988), especially the fact that she had the illustrator make her look older in the illustration so that if she talked about the book years after it came out, children wouldn't ask why she didn't look like the picture! Dolan won't have that problem unless she transmogrifies into a worm!

Kramer, Kara. Tell Me a Lion Story
May 10, 2022 by Candlewick Press
Copy provided by Young Adult Books Central

A young girl asks her father to tell her a story, but isn't pleased with the direction his narrative takes. She demands he come up with a lion story, but doesn't like the size of the lion or the named the father gives him, so the father wisely tells her that they will tell the story together. The rest of the book has Mad Lib style blanks so that the reader of the book can contribute to the story as well. The lion invents unnamed things, flies with great unspecificity, and travels to the moon before heading home to put on his pajamas. The lion then asks the girl and her father to tell HIM a story, and make it about a ________! Good Points

The illustration style instantly took me back to Edith and Clement Hurd's Johnny Lion's Book (1965), with it's bright colors and rough edged pencil over mixed media drawings. Perhaps it was the fact that the father sported a plaid dress shirt and reminded me a bit of Alvin and the Chipmunk's human adoptive father, David Seville (Check the pictures; I'll wait!), that this had such a strong 1960s vibe for me.

My own children were huge fans of telling stories, and loved writing them down and illustrating them, but many of my middle school students struggle with coming up with the most basic story ideas. A book like this is a great way to encourage young readers to take ownership of stories and create their own, starting with filling in the blanks and hopefully moving on to formulating more ideas. While having this book in a library might cause a few problems (blanks are notoriously hard to LEAVE blank!), it is a great book in an elementary classroom, and I can see a lot of great lion stories being produced by first and second graders inspired by this tale.

Hills' Rocket Writes a Story, Coyle and Taylor's The Biggest Story, Venable's Amy the Red Panda Is Writing The Best Story in The World, and Spinelli's The Best Story are all great books to pair with this book and encourage young readers to come up with their own story. Bonus points if you sew paper together, have the child illustrate the book, and bind the pages together with wallpaper samples. 

Jeffers, Oliver and Winston, Sam. The Dictionary Story
August 6, 2024 by Candlewick Press
Copy provided by Young Adult Books Central 

Don't pick this book up expecting to learn much about about the history of the dictionary, along the lines of Bryant and Sweet's The Right Word: Roget and Thesaurus. There is some information here, but the real draw is the innovative book design. I ended up having to read this book in three different ways. First, I read the text, hand lettered in Jeffers' distinctive half-cursive, half-print scrawl. This told the story of the dictionary, who was having an identity crisis, since all of the other books told stories while she, who had all of the words they used, told no story at all. A story develops, but it is a messy nonsensical one involving alligators and doughnuts and rulers who run roughshod over the dictionary, and ends with soap dropping on top of a tornado and making a real mess. Luckily, once everyone sang the alphabet song, all of the words went back into the correct order, and the dictionary decided to let the other books deal with telling tales.

On my second pass, I focused on the illustrations, because there is a lot to find there. There are some full dictionary pages that start to break down and slide to the bottom, but leave those for a moment. Several animals, along with a ruler and a Viking, scamper across the grayish tan pages, sometimes in a swirl of words. This starts and ends with a row of photographed books that have hand drawn titles.

I have to admit that at first I didn't read every word on the end papers, although I did notice that the first word of each dictionary entry formed a nice introduction. The definitions there, as well as in the running dictionary column that appeared under all of the illustrations and served as a visual road, were quirky, fun, and slightly nonsensical, like this one for panda: "A bear-like black-and-white mammal that lives in Chinas and eats plants, especially bamboo. They aren't interested in pancakes, lunch boxes, or syrup slurping alligators." Then, once I started looking at the definitions at the bottom of the pages, I had to go back and start all over again, because there's a sort of stream-of-consciousness commentary going on.

The artistry involved to put all of these elements together takes quite a team, and they are thanked at the beginning of the book. I can only imagine the hours that went into putting this book together!

Younger readers will be most interested in the alligator and his exploits with the doughnut in the main text, but older readers might pick this up and find themselves getting lost in the other aspects of this text.

There's really not another book that I can think of that can be compared to this one, but fans of Winston and Jeffers will enjoy this wild fever dream of a story about a dictionary who learns the hard way to love herself for who she is.