The Museum Makers! The Collectorsby Alice Feagan

Winslow and Rosie were building an impressive collection of natural wonders.

In fact, the two girl adventurers have a charming tree house home in a spreading oak, and they have almost completely covered one wall with shadow box frames filled with the products of their explorations. Only one space is left to be filled.

The two friends made the perfect team.

Winslow leads the expeditions, hoping to locate unusual finds in unusual places. Rosie researches and identifies the finds, recording them with drawings in her journal.

One morning they realize that there is only one place left on the exhibition wall. They are determined to fill that place with something spectacular, something novel!

So they packed their gear and set off into the forest.

It's not long before Winslow spots an outcroping with a huge purple gemstone! But it's just too massive to move! Then Rosie discovers the skeleton of a T-Rex that needs excavation, but digging out the whole thing is just not do-able! Other items they like are located too high on a tree and too deep in a lake. Finally, their luck takes a turn for the better. They venture down deep into a wide cave, until the headlamps reveal an sleepy, angry...... BEAR!

AHHHHHHHHH!!

The bear gives up the chase on the way down the mountain, but Winslow and Rosie don't stop running until they are inside the latch their own front door. Their finds bag is empty, and so is that empty space still on their specimen wall.

Maybe enough is enough! Or maybe there is a different way to look at nature at home!

And soon the intrepid but also handy adventurers create a window in that space, one through which they can look out on nature any time they want and find many wonderful things. And they are just in time to watch a nestful of eggs hatching in a tree outside, in Alice Feagan's The Collectors (Kids Can Books, 2021).

Author-illustrator Alice Feagan's story of adventuring girl naturalists is told in crisp text and terrific cut-paper illustrations of her outgoing explorers' own little nature museum which may inspire primary graders to seek out and curate their own nature collections.

Writes Booklist, "Muted but detailed digital artwork confers the aesthetic of an old, well-loved museum onto the page ...."

Too Much of a Good Thing? The Two Mutch Sisters by Carol Brendler

The Mutch Sisters were collectors. It started when they were very little girls.

First there were two toy teapots.

One for Ruby, one for Violet.

As Ruby and Violet grew, so did their collections. But Violet
and Ruby had radically clashing tastes. The rotund Violet favored the rococo--fussy, flowery, and fancy in clothes and cushy, kitschy, and curvaceous in furnishings. The spare Ruby sought the minimalist in everything, simple, straight-lined, neutral colored, with perhaps a touch of stripes. Even their two cats were different. Soon their spacious home grew crowded and cluttered. The two Mutch sisters had too much of everything.

The day came when Ruby could not even find a spot for her teacup at teatime.

"This house isn't big enough for the both of us. I'm moving out!"

Ruby began removing her half of the collections.

One gargoyle,
One glockenspiel,
One brass spittoon,
One French bassoon.

Leaving Violet alone among her now lonely bibelots and curios. Ruby moved across town into a no-nonsense moderne house where she found just the right place for each of her artfully-arranged objets d'arte.

"I like it!" Ruby said...

But something was missing.

Violet finds something missing, too, and there's only one thing to do, in Carol Brendler's forthcoming The Two Mutch Sisters (Houghton Mifflin Clarion, 2018), a humorous and doubly punny and homophonically-titled tale of two sisters whose penchant for tchotchkes turns them into hoarders. But as Brendler's perfectly paced narrative points out, there's one thing you can't have too much of, and that's the company of a sympathetic sister. Youngsters will love Violet's plan to bring the two sisters, their cats, and their teacups together again, and artist Lisa Brown's final two-page spread polishes it off with just the right style of gently comic illustrations done up in crayoned blackline and watercolored illustrations, right down to Violet's chest of tools and pack of mules. Vive' la difference!