What's Behind That Spooky Door? Pout-Pout Fish: Haunted House by Deborah Diesen

Mr. Fish was nervous about going out on Halloween.

He didn't like getting spooked, but he did love candy and costumes.

But when his buddy with the built-in lantern offers to go out with him, Mr. Fish puts on his witch's hat and goes along to trick or treat. But when he learns that their first stop is Miss Shimmer's Haunted House, his scales begin to shiver and his fins are all a-quiver.

"Don't be fooled by make-believe monsters!" advised Mr. Lantern Fish.

So Pout-Pout Fish screws his courage up to the sticking place and swims bravely inside Miss Shimmer's scary house, giving the guard shark at the door a wide berth.

But once inside, there are a lot of scary sights. There are creepy crawlies, and eerie eels, Yipes!

"They're not real!" whispers Mr. Lantern Fish.

But even Mr. Lantern Fish's bravado fails when they swim right into a bunch of eight scary snakes!

But this time it's Mr. Pout-Pout Fish who reassures his friend. It's only clever Octopus with snake masks on each tentacle!

Pout-Pout Fish is now ready for more fright-full adventures, in Deborah Diesen's Pout-Pout Fish: Haunted House (A Pout-Pout Fish Paperback Adventure) (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), as this small fry faces the sometimes scary costumes of Halloween and finds them fun. It never hurts for
preschoolers to get some advance preparation before they head out on Halloween night with the other trick or treaters, and illustrator Dan Hanna's comic denizens of the deep in holiday guise add to this not-so frightful tale in author Diesen's popular series.

For more fishy Halloween fun, share this one with Diesen’s and Hanna’s paperback Halloween tale, Trick or Treat, Pout-Pout Fish (A Pout-Pout Fish Mini Adventure).

One Fish, Blue Fish! Follow Me! (Finding Dory) by Bill Scotton

DORY MAY NOT HAVE A GOOD MEMORY, BUT SHE SHE HAS GOOD FRIENDS.

That bright blue fish, Dory the blue tang, memorable but memory-challenged, is back as the star of her own movie and spin-off books for the youngest movie-goers.

It seems Dory does remember her mom and dad and longs to be reunited with them, and her oldest buddy, Nemo, along with his dad Marlin, are on board with her quest.

As Dory swims and swims, she meets up with Hank, the septopus (one leg short of being an octopus) and Destiny the bowhead whale, who both know where Dory's parents used to live, Bailey the beluga, who helps with his echolocation skills, and Becky the loon, who, er, tries to be helpful in her loony way.

All of these friends and more wind up following Dory to find her family, in Bill Scotton's charming shiny and shaped little board book, DisneyPixar Finding Dory: Follow Me! (Studio Fun International, 2016). which introduces the youngest readers to the cast of characters in the just released movie. Fun for little ones too young to know all about Finding Nemo, this sturdy and inviting board book is a good preview of the coming attraction playing soon in movie houses everywhere.

A Visit from Manta Claus? The Not Very Merry Pout-Pout Fish by Deborah Diesen

A GIFT SHOULD HAVE MEANING,

PLUS A BIT OF BLING-ZING,

SO I'LL SHOP TILL I DROP

FOR EACH JUST-RIGHT THING!

Pout-Pout Fish has a problem. He is a perfectionist, and his search for the perfect big and bright gift for each of his pescatory friends fails, he lapses into a pout.

The stores are filled with fancy things, but none of them seem fitting for Miss Shimmer and his other special friends. His favorite aquatic shoppe, Ahab's, has a myriad of merchandise, and the banners proclaim everything from...

PEG LEGS TO SCALE POLISH!

But the bling has lost its zing. Mr. Fish's eyes are dazzled, but his mood grows frazzled. He proceeds with his shopping, until it grows dark and the last shop is in sight. But what he sees is a sign that gives him the gloomy glums.

WE'RE CLOSED!

He's got nothing! Will he have to skip the Christmas shindig altogether? Mr. Fish sinks into a first-class sulk.

Then he has a thought.

IT'S NOT TOO LATE TO START

FOR THE BEST GIFTS COME FROM THE HEART.

In her latest Pout-Pout Adventure our favorite down-in-the-mouth fish rises to the occasion with his own fin-made creations after all, in Deborah Diesen's The Not Very Merry Pout-Pout Fish (A Pout-Pout Fish Adventure) (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). With versatile verses and a Christmas message that even the Grinch couldn't find fault with, Pout-Pout comes through with the perfect present for everyone after all. Diesen's talented collaborator, artist Dan Hanna provide the very merry eye-candy illustrations that add much to the final festive outcome, and the Christmas party is a deep-water delight after all.

Meet Me For Lunch? Fish Food by Andy Mansfield and Henning Lohlein

A LITTLE SEA WORM SWIMS AROUND, HAPPY AS CAN BE.

CHOMP!

Sic transit sea worm!

What is a food chain? Well, for one thing, it's an important primary grade science concept. Anything and everything plays a powerful role in that process, as Andy Mansfield's intriguing and inventive Fish Food (Little Bee Books, 2015) makes clear. You might be on the bottom of the food chain, or you might be at the top of the food chain in your native ecology, but if we eat, we're all linked together in it.

Even lowly little sea worm, who gets chomped by a Nemo look-alike, has doubtless just chowed down on some plankton, and the little clownfish who eats him soon gets gulped by a bigger spotted fish, who in turn is preyed upon by Jaws II himself, who fills the page with a catastrophic super-sized CRUNCH!

Author Andy Mansfield, whose resume' identifies him as a "paper engineer," is the designer of the pop-up devices which portray and propel the jaws of the three predator fish, all just looking for the right bite, while artist Henning Lohlein is the creator of the deep-water setting and fish face illustrations that make this one an outstanding toy and movable book. Adding humor to the fun of each unfolding scene of opening and closing jaws are Mansfield's supporting cast of undersea bystanders, a little crab who's scuttled into a bottle with a relieved "Whew," a duo of clams that cry out "Here comes trouble!" a queasy eel who mutters "I can't look!" and some small fry who squeak"Time to go, Fred!" It's a visible and funny presentation of the marine food chain that will please toddlers and early readers alike.

Back to School: Pout-Pout Fish Goes to School by Deborah Diesen

A LONG TIME AGO,
WHEN POUT-POUT FISH WAS VERY SMALL,
HE HEADED OFF TO SCHOOL
FOR THE FIRST TIME OF ALL.

It's a swim down memory lane, and Pout-Pout Fish recalls his first day at school.

It didn't begin well.

He gets lost on the way, and his backpack is getting very heavy by the time he swims up to what looks like an enormous school, unfortunately named ROCK BOTTOM ELEMENTARY SCHOOL.

Inside, he wanders about, wondering where he is supposed to be. He tries going into a classroom, where all the students seem to be where they are supposed to be, looking like they know what they are doing, practicing printing their names. Pout-Pout tries, but his fins flub the job.

He drifts on down the corridor to a room where young denizens of the deep are learning about shapes. He hasn't a clue what to call them, and his rhombus is all wrong.

He blub-blubs and flub-flubs on down the hall and tries another classroom, where the subject is math. Pout-Pout hasn't a clue what to do. His usually pout-pout face is even more droopy than ever.

"I'M NOT SMART.
I'LL NEVER GET IT.
I DON'T BELONG.
I SHOULD FORGET IT!"

But before he can swish out the exit, Miss Hewitt, his teacher, finds him with a word for the wise.

"DON'T YOU FRET.
YOU DON'T HAVE TO KNOW
WHAT YOU HAVEN'T LEARNED YET!

With a comforting fin on his back, she shows him a door with a sign that says BRAND-NEW FISH, a room where everyone is a newbie, and they all begin to learn together.

What's more natural for a fish than joining his school, and Deborah Diesen's recent The Pout-Pout Fish Goes to School (A Pout-Pout Fish Adventure) Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014) deals, not with worries about making friends on the first day, but the equally scary thoughts about being able to do the work there, an even more pressing problem for some small fry, to whom the work the big fish are doing looks totally intimidating. Easy-going quatrains carry Diesen's story forward, and artist Dan Hanna's familiar portrayals of poor, dour Pout-Pout Fish, whose off-to-school mood is not so good, shows how a lot of kids are feeling about what lies ahead of them. Hanna's flummoxed and glum Fish has a humorous "Eeyore" approach to everything, and his visual jokes along the way make for reassuring cartoon fun for youngsters in the first-day story circle.

Diesen's other top-selling undersea stories include The Pout-Pout Fish (A Pout-Pout Fish Adventure) The Pout-Pout Fish in the Big-Big Dark (A Pout-Pout Fish Adventure), and Sweet Dreams, Pout-Pout Fish (A Pout-Pout Fish Adventure).

Fish Tale: The Story of Fish and Snail by Deborah Freedman

EVERY DAY .... SNAIL SITS IN ONE SPOT AND WAITS FOR FISH TO COME HOME WITH A STORY.

Stay-at-home snail has a good thing going! Fish loves to swim off and find adventure. Best of all, each day Fish ventures forth and finds a new book, reads it, and swims home to retell it to snail.

But today is different. Fish can't just tell this story: for this one you have to BE THERE!

"AAARRRGH!  SNAIL!!

THE NEW BOOK HAS A WHOLE OCEAN, A SECRET TREASURE, AND A PIRATE!"

When snail is too timid to follow Fish out of his old story and into the new one, Fish gets impatient.

"FINE."

But Snail can't bear for this to be The End of The Story of Fish and Snail. He creeps to the very edge of the page and peers across to the next book. Can he make the leap to follow Fish into a new story, one with treasure and pirates? Will Snail take the plunge?

In Deborah Freedman's new little modern fable of friendship, The Story of Fish and Snail (Viking, 2013), being a friend requires a leap of faith that brings a new beginning to Snail's story, one in which he is brave enough to be a bold buccaneer along with friend Fish. Freedman's story has a little meta-fiction fun, playing with the concept of book and page in the same way that Mo Willems did so humorously in his recent Elephant and Piggie tale, We Are in a Book! (An Elephant and Piggie Book), with the added theme that friendship and books have a way of stretching the boundaries for each of the pals in unforeseen ways. The New York Times Book Review says "It's meta for beginners, and even if the surreality may float over young heads, they'll relate to the story of friends with differences," while Kirkus raves, "Texture, scale and angle accentuate the exciting difference between the in-book worlds and the pale library background. This marvelous metabook shines in both concept and beauty."

Crime and Punishment II: This Is Not My Hat by Jon Klassen

THIS IS NOT MY HAT.

I STOLE IT FROM A BIG FISH.

HE WAS SLEEPING WHEN I DID IT.

The narrator is a little fish, brazenly wearing a blue Derby, which he readily admits to swiping from a snoozing fish, who, the little fish optimistically opines, probably won't wake up any time soon. And if he does, he probably won't notice. And the hat didn't fit him anyway. And  the perpetrator is swimming rapidly toward a kelp forest, where the big fish will never find him.

Okay,  so there was an eyewitness to the crime. A little crab with big stalky eyes saw it all, but he has promised the larcenous little fish not to tell which way  he went. It is an almost perfect crime. Except....

Except that none of the thief's hopeful speculations are actually true. The big fish does wake up:, he does look up to check out his chapeau; the crab squeals like a stool pigeon; and the big fish is off to the perp's hideout in the swish of a fin.

Crime will out in Jon Klassen's just-published This Is Not My Hat (Candlewick, 2012), a worthy successor to his best-selling chapeau chase, I Want My Hat Back (E. B. White Read-Aloud Award. Picture Books) (see my review here). Again, Klassen's darkly droll tale is a high point in the picture book genre, with his spare text and simple but evocative illustrations complementing the text exquisitely. Klassen's character's eyes speak volumes, as the big fish looks up to where his hat should be even as the naive little malefactor is speculating that his victim won't even notice the hat snitch. The big fish's eyes narrow as the hunt for the culprit commences, and the crab's bulgy eyes need only look page right to put the pursuit of the perpetrator into motion--and the outcome of this crime and punishment saga is no longer in doubt. We know which fish is going to swim out of that seaweed wearing that hat.

With a text of so few, but such well-chosen words, Klassen's illustrations create the tension and the humor that makes this picture book a winner. An artist who can telegraph the outcome of a tale subtly but shrewdly with  no more than a pattern of bubbles is rare. As in his earlier headgear whodunnit, Klassen discretely lets the certain execution of justice take place off-page in a nod to the sensibilities of his young readers.

Receiving starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, School Library Journal, and Horn Book for  This Is Not My Hat, Klassen has the credentials to show that the success of his first book was no hat trick. A tip of the topper to a master of the art of the picture book.

Through Those Eyes: Fish Eyes: A Book You Can Count On by Lois Ehlert

IF I COULD PUT ON A SUIT OF SCALES,

ADD SOME FINS AND ONE OF THESE TAILS,

I'D CLOSE MY EYES AND THEN I'D WISH

THAT I'D TURN INTO A BEAUTIFUL FISH.

In its abstract essence the shape of a fish is sinuous, sensual, and seductive, making us think it would be worth being a fish to be able to swim, seemingly effortlessly, like a fish, undulating through those deep blue waters .

The award-winning collage artist Lois Ehlert'a Fish Eyes: A Book You Can Count On (Sandpiper, 2012) makes use of this quality in this new, large format edition, forthcoming just in time for preschool teachers to include it in their library of "big books" made for use with the early childhood education story circle. It is a counting book, sure, but oh, what a way to get to ten!

With a modest little pilot fish as our guide, Ehlert takes our eyes along on a stunning swim among a school of similar slender green and yellow fish as they meet various gorgeous denizens of the deep in ten double-page spreads that suggest, rather than delineate, well-known fishes of the sea--a toothy "barracuda," two "angelfish," leaping "salmon," and so on. Along the way, the enumerated fish, portrayed in Ehlert's signature collage style take us on to meet multicolored fish of many shapes, plus our little guide, which add up to the featured number.

As she often does, Ehlert makes adroit use of the die-cut technique by having the open circle of each fish's eye showing through a color featured in the fishes on the previous and following page. There are four striped fish, five spotted fish, and six fantailed fish, all in luminous colors set against a royal blue background, right up to the ten darting fish and onto a spread of plain brown fish, all sporting the eyes of the jewel colors of the adjacent pages. It is a novel counting experience expressed memorably in scrumptious artwork.

Great for preschoolers just learning to count and for art classes studying novel uses of collage, color and shape, Fish Eyes: A Book You Can Count On (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012) is a dip in the deep that youngsters will want to take again and again.

Other notable concept books by Lois Ehlert include Planting a Rainbow, Waiting for Wings, Color Zoo, Snowballs, and Eating the Alphabet: Fruits & Vegetables from A to Z (Harcourt Brace Big Book).