TIME OUT! Fix That Clock by Kurt Cyrus

Tock, Tick, Clunk!
The clock’s a pile of junk.
Rusty, dusty, moldy, musty.
Tock, Tick, Clunk!

The once splendid town tower clock is telling no time.

The tower is rickety, tippy, and tottery, good mostly for housing bats and mice.

It’s time to take time to fix that clock.

Marching up the ramp
Up we march the fix the clock.
Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!

Armed with sledge crowbars and hammers, the three workers repair the broken-down stair.

Swing that hammer, Super Slamer.

Bam! BAM! BAM!

At last the workers take on the most demanding task–-repairing the rust-encrusted clockwork!

Give the gears a yank.

Tock, Tick, CLANK!

And then the newly oiled and polished gears are meshing and the clock is ticking and bonging out the hour, in Kurt Cyrus’ delightfully chiming and rhyming Fix That Clock (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). Author Cyrus’s latest is filled with delicious poesy, the rhymes are just right, onamatopoeia abounds in with construction sounds, the ousted animals are re-housed in little homes fashioned from wood scraps, and appropriately, the job is done right at quitting time. Artist Cyrus fills his double-page spreads with charmingly realistic paintings, enlivened by dizzying perspectives, and there are touches of visual humor, as a mouse runs up the overall leg of one worker and with quirky independence, the carpenters cut windows–-square, semi-circular, circular, and triangular--giving the reader plenty of action to peruse on each page.

And all in good time, there she stands, restored, the Queen of Clocks! Altogether an outstanding example of picture book art, this one is must-have for children’s collections, just the thing for young time-telling students' story time.

Together Is Better: The Tall Man and the Small Mouse by Mara Bergman

On a tall hill in a tall house
lived a tall man and a small mouse.

All day the tall man did tall man things--plucking apples, removing cats and kites stuck in tall trees....

All night the mouse had small things to do, finding dropped pens and long-lost rings and pennies....

Since they worked different shifts, the tall man and the small mouse knew nothing of each other... until the day the tall man could not complete a tall task.

The tall man went to fix,
the town's great clock.
It had no tick;
it had no tock.

The tall man tried and tried and tried. The hands were stuck.
And he was too big to get inside. Bad luck!

The tall man goes home to study his clock book and slips off his tall boots to take a nap. And when he wakes, he discovers someone very small inside one boot--the mouse!

"Mouse," he said, "you're small and clearly clever.
I wonder whether
I may borrow you.
I've a most important thing to do.

The mouse complies, and when she tries, she finds inside a tiny piece to fix....

The town clock is good as new, and the two make their way home, new partners, as the tall man puts it:

We may be of a different kind,
But both of us can fix and find.

Two can be better than one when there are things to be done, in Mara Bergman's The Tall Man and the Small Mouse (Candlewick Press, 2018), a sprightly rhyming fable of combining traits and talents to get the job done. Berman's rhymes in free rhythm add to the fun of reading this one, and artist Birgitta Sif provides the long and the short of it in her long-stemmed spring flowers and elongated figures, finishing up with the Tall Man making an airplane for Mouse to pilot. In their starred review, Booklist says, "a rhythmic, rhyming text that reads aloud beautifully [and]... Capturing the sense, the polish, and the wit of the verse, Sif’s digitally colored pencil drawings bring their own elegance and charm to the narrative while adding amusing details for curious viewers to discover."

Countdown: Around the Clock by Roz Chast

FROM 6 TO 7 PETE IS UP

DRINKING FROM HIS FAVORITE CUP.

Not only is Pete apparently an early riser. He's also quite a slob. His kitchen is a shambles of burned toast, spilled chocolate syrup, broken eggs, and an overflowing blender.

But not to worry. Somehow by 7:00, Pete's kitchen is tidied by invisible hands, and he's ready to take on some interior decoration.

FROM 7 TO 8, PETE'S MUSE

TELLS HIM TO PAINT HIS ROOM CHARTREUSE.

Other characters, Bea, Lou, Hazel Jane, and Deb, also change activities every hour on the hour throughout the morning, But then it's time for lunch.

FROM 12 TO 1, LYNN EATS BALONEY

WITH HER IMAGINARY FRIEND TONY.

You can see where this one is going, as Roz Chast's new Around the Clock (Atheneum Books, 2015) takes youngsters through the hours of the clock in a humorous lesson in telling time on the conventional clock. Chast, a famous cartoonist for the New Yorker magazine whose style is instantly recognizable, adds some deliciously silly, internally rhyming verse to each hour's activities, full circle, right through the night, bringing the reader back to messy eater Peter, as his dreams are interrupted by his alarm clock, when we might safely predict that he'll arise to clutter the kitchen yet again.

In our times, when some young adults seem to be incapable of reading the hour and minutes from a non-digital clock face, a book which teaches time-telling with imagination, whimsical humor, and clever couplets that can't help provoking chuckles is a welcome addition to any bookshelf. As the New York Times reviewer says, "In Chast's world, the emotions that most picture books aim to help children manage are given gloriously subversive free reign."

Roz Chast is also the author of the zanily offbeat back-to-school story, Marco Goes to School,  the co-creator  (with comedian Steve Martin) of the wacky alphabet book, The Alphabet from A to Y With Bonus Letter Z! and her memoir for adult readers, Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir., a 2014 National Book Award nominee.