Outside! I See You See by Richard Jackson

MOM CALLS, "MAISIE, WILL YOU WALK THE DOG?"

DOG PULLING, MAISIE PUSHING, THEY SET OFF.

Tinker, like all dogs, is always ready for a walk, so Maisie and her brother Jonah decide to go outside to see what they can see. And what they can see is wondrous!

Tinker trees a cat and they see a tree with pointed leaves, which become the ears of a multitude of cats. A border of tall blooms becomes a popsicle garden. A swooping bird's trajectory becomes a sliding board, and two rows of wet sheets blowing on two clotheslines become a secret tunnel. The dangling branches of a weeping willow become bell ropes to pull to begin a carillon of chiming bells.

"I HEAR IT!"

TING-A-LING. JINGLE...

BONG! BONG! BONG!"

The fluffy clouds are dinosaurs, and flower petals blowing in the spring winds becomes a flight of goldfish with fluffy fins and then falling orange snowflakes all around.

It's anything but a humdrum, everyday, walk-the-dog day when children let their imagination roam free as the spring winds, in Richard Jackson's joyful I See You See (Atheneum Books, 2021), illustrated magically by artist Patrice Barton. This one challenges youngsters to go outside and see what they can see. Says Kirkus Reviews, "A warm, quiet ode to imagination."

Night-Frights! Pippa's Night Parade by Lisa Robinson

Pippa loves listening to wild, imaginative stories about all kinds of things that go bump in the night.

But when it's night and the lights go off, they return to worry her.

VILLAINS

AND MONSTERS

AND BEASTS.

Oh, my!

One night a horned dragon comes roaring out of her favorite story! Then a bearded pirate wants to feed her to the sharks! And is that a grouchy bear at her door?

Nobody wants to go to bed with those things around.

Pippa doesn't just lie there. She runs to her parents' room! But they always bring her back to her own bed.

But Pippa has a PLAN.

She leaves an invitation inside all her favorite scary storybooks.

SHARPEN YOUR CLAWS!

PREPARE YOUR FUR AND PAWS!

COME SCARE THE PANTS OFF PIPPA!

And when all else fails, Pippa designs costume wardrobes for each beast and brute and baddie, They try on top hats and tutus, ballgowns and boas, and, of course, matching purses and shoes.

"STRUT YOU STUFF!" SAYS PIPPA.

The creatures have a blast, parading and posing until they're too pooped to pop. And when they drop off to sleep, Pippa cruises to her own bed for a good night's snooze.

Pippa discovers that with her imagination, she can beat the storybook monsters at their own game, in Lisa Robinson's Pippa's Night Parade (Two Lions Press, 2019).  Artist Lucy Fleming provides the storybook baddies, and Pippa creates the posh garb to keep her mental monsters nattily attired and ultimately too tired to cause trouble in a bedtime story that turns the tables on nighttime fears.

Your True Colors: They Say Blue by Jillian Tamaki

THEY SAY BLUE IS THE COLOR OF THE SKY,
WHICH IS TRUE TODAY.

A girl goes out under blue skies, skies clearly blue, but accented with a flock of blackbirds.

But is it always blue?

THEY SAY THE SEA IS BLUE, TOO.
BUT WHEN I HOLD IT IN MY HAND,
IT'S CLEAR AS GLASS.

When a child goes forth, there are many things to wonder about. The girl wonders if blue whales are really blue. She's never seen a one (although as she takes a swim in the sea, there is one beneath her, unseen, a dark shape beneath the dark blue waters). And as she moves through the landscape, what she sees seems to morph in front of her eyes. The sea of grass in the field seems like an ocean she could sail upon, but it is not what she imagines it to be.

IT'S JUST PLAIN OLD YELLOW GRASS.

But then the girl marvels at a flower and spots a tree, and she's off again in a vivid fantasy of herself becoming a tree, with spreading limbs and fingers changing to leaves.

As the poet Walt Whitman wrote, "There was a child went forth every day. And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became...." Caldecott Honor winner, (for her This One Summer, Jillian Tamaki's They Say Blue (Abrams, 2018) is a picture essay upon that theme. With ink-line drawings set off by gorgeous swirls of colors, both cool blues and greens and and warm reds and golds, as the child blends with the seasonal changes in the landscapes around her and returns at last to her room, anchored, full-circle, by the blue of the coverlet on her bed, where her mother braids her hair as dark crows wheel through the red of the setting sun. This is a quiet book for thoughtful moments of pondering our outer and inner worlds. School Library Journal stars this one and says, "Attuned to a child's psychology and patterns of critical thinking, this visually stunning work is a must-purchase for libraries."

A Walk On The Wild Side: The Nonsense Book by Eric Carle

COULD A LEOPARD

CHANGE HIS SPOT

TO A TIGER-ISH STRIPE?

PROBABLY NOT.

In the latest work of that dean of picture book art, Eric Carle, readers are given license to park their rational brain outside and enter an especially colorful world of the absurd. Within the slim conceit of a cockamamie circus midway, nothing is what is to be expected.

"LET'S TRADE HATS," THE RIDER SAID.

BUT "NEIGH NEIGH!" SAID THE HORSE.

"LET'S TRADE HEADS INSTEAD!"

And so they do, laughing at the inane sight of themselves as a horse-headed man and a human-headed horse. A mama Kanga sports a human Roo in her pouch, a train's smokestack puffs out fluffy white sheep instead of smoke, and a man sees a surprised ape staring back at him from the trick mirror.

In his latest, The Nonsense Show (Philomel Books, 2015), Eric Carle dishes out a preposterous plenty of balderdash in a bit of a delightfully bizarre departure from his usual story books, letting his silly side go for the surreal, a setting in which it is perfectly reasonable when a magician pulls a boy out of his hat

But not to worry: Eric Carle's signature tissue-paper collage technique is in full display here, in a peerless illustrative style that is a fantasy feast for the eye. "Carle hits it out of the nonsense park," says Booklist.

Have You Seen My Friend? The Adventures of Beekle! An Unimaginary Friend by Dan Santat

HE WAS BORN ON AN ISLAND FAR AWAY WHERE IMAGINARY FRIENDS WERE CREATED.

HERE, THEY LIVED AND PLAYED, EACH EAGERLY AWAITING TO BE IMAGINED BY A REAL CHILD.

But Beekle must be hard to imagine, because he has been waiting for his turn far too long. At last he takes matters into his own pudgy hands and does the unimaginable: he sets out, captain of his fate, on his own, steering his own boat, crossing rough seas with fairly unimaginable creatures, and thinking of the friend that must be out there, somewhere, in the real world.

THE REAL WORLD WAS A STRANGE PLACE. NO KIDS WERE EATING CAKE. NO ONE STOPPED TO HEAR THE MUSIC.

Beekle has disembarked in a big city, where everyone seems to be bustling somewhere--but everyone is also in their own world, reading newspapers, listening to the music in their own ears, even catching a nap as they ride the subway. Nobody notices a doughy, blocky blob of a little guy hopefully wearing his paper crown. He's nobody's imaginary friend. He's invisible in the crowd, unimagined among the skyscrapers and busy traffic.

HE FELT VERY SAD. THEN HE HEARD....

"HELLO!"

There is a girl there. She can see him and she's talking to him. Shy at first, they smile.

THERE WAS SOMETHING ABOUT HER THAT FELT JUST RIGHT.

Finding the one who can imagine the real you is the theme of noted author and artist Dan Santat in his newest creation, The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend (Little Brown, 2014). Santat's narrative style is simple and yet evocative of the loneliness of the crowd. His artwork here is so varied and creative that it almost defies description, as he takes his main character from tropical island to the seascapes inhabited by unknown sea creatures, and into a hard-edged rectilinear urban scene in grim contrast to his pillowy, billowy little hero. The contrasting island to ocean to cityscape settings give Santat a chance to showcase his considerable illustrative chops, displayed in pencil, ink, watercolors, and Photoshop art, in a story of an imaginary friend like no other. "...Like Beekle's new friend, there's something here that feels just right as an "unimaginary" friendship creates a joyous, recognizable bond. A terrific addition to any library," says School Library Journal in its starred review.

Santat's inimitable illustrative style can be seen in his own Sidekicks and in his artwork in Mac Barnett's Oh No!: Or How My Science Project Destroyed the World and Oh No! Not Again!: (Or How I Built a Time Machine to save History) (Or at Least My History Grade) and Samantha Berger's Crankenstein.

Back to School: Ninja Boy Goes to School by N. D. Wilson

IT'S HARD BEING A NINJA.
YOU MUST RISE  BEFORE THE SUN.

It's hard starting Kindergarten, too. It, too, requires rising early, being silent and sometimes remaining perfectly still.

A boy needs to get his "NINJA STUF" box down from the high shelf and get geared up to face the day--all in black, with knapsack, mask, and blue headband in place and his stoic ninja face on.

The first challenge is the school bus.

NINJAS MUST BE ONE WITH THEIR SURROUNDINGS.

The ninja clings to the ceiling of the bus like a fly.

Inside the schoolroom he feels trapped and wants to run away, but his ninja training comes in handy.

A NINJA MUST BE PATIENT LIKE A DEEP-ROOTED TREE.

The ninja stays in his seat and waits for his moment. But a true ninja cannot be contained, and when the teacher is not looking, he leaps like a gazelle out the window.

But what does a little ninja do next?

The ninja may not know, but the principal does, and soon Ninja Boy is on the carpet and calling upon all his skills at remaining silent while his parents are called. OOPS.

There are times in life when it's better to keep your inner ninja undercover, as our boy learns in N. D. Wilson's just published Ninja Boy Goes to School (Random House, 2014).  Kids will giggle as Ninja Boy tries out his moves on the first day of school, with somewhat mixed results. Normally, ninjas are not necessarily nice guys, and Wilson's little main character finds out that there's a time and place for everything, with the help of J. J. Harrison's bright comic book-style illustrations. Pair this one with Aree Chung's new top-seller, Ninja! (Henry Holt and Company, 2014) for a duo of nimble ninja stories.

Flight of Fancy: Follow Me by Tricia Tusa

HOW DO YOU LIKE TO GO UP IN A SWING,
UP IN THE AIR SO BLUE?
OH, I DO THINK IT'S THE PLEASANTEST THING
EVER A CHILD CAN DO!

So begins Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Swing," whose theme Trica Tusa's forthcoming Follow Me (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) recaptures in her soaring fanciful flight of childhood imagination. Tusa's swinger is no plump and dimpled Victorian tot: she's a long, limber-limbed kid whose bony ankles have grown well out of her brown pants and whose long, skinny braid swings wide behind her, but as she climbs on that old rope and board swing and kicks off, her thoughts soar through the air with those of her predecessor of more than a century ago.

I WANDER THROUGH PINK
AND GET LOST IN BLUE.

LOOK AT ME, FOLLOW ME
INTO THE CURL OF A BREEZE. ACROSS THAT EASY SWAY OF BLUE.

Outdoing Stevenson's always tethered-to-earth child, Tusa's little girl soars through the colors of a spring garden, over the wall of reality, and into the browns, yellows, and reds of a beginning-to-bloom wood, floating across the rooftops, finally to drift down, down, down to the green world to find her way back home at last.

As Robert Frost puts it, it's "good both going and coming back," in Tusa's Follow Me, a celebration of childhood imagination and its ability to slip the bounds of earth and fly, or as her dedication says, a salute "to childhood and all that comes after."

Tusa's illustrations have contributed to many noted books, including In a Blue Room, Maebelle's Suitcase (Reading Rainbow Book) and this year's The Sandwich Swap, co-authored by Jordan's Princess Rania and Kelly DiPucchio, author of Grace for President.