But HOW DO I... Fly! by Mark Teague

This fledgling flight denier thinks he's got it all figured out.

THE NEST IS BEST!

It's been a cinch since he hatched. He waits in the nest and Mama Robin brings him breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. What's not to like?

The only problem is the lack of scintillation in his diet. Worms for every meal and snack? Bo-RING!

!!!

Baby Robin is the avian contrarian version of the terrible twos! Mama Robin is fatigued and frazzled with her youngster's tantrums!

But--OOPS! Baby Robin's little food fit flips him right out of the nest. He flutters and flops all the way to the ground. Now what?

Mama suggests he flap his wings and fly back up to the nest. Baby suggests she carry him back up on her back. Mama suggests he try flapping his own wings. Baby is stubborn. He's oppositional. He's a classic case of FAILURE TO FLEDGE!

He summons up images of alternative modes of flight--from piggy-back to pogo stick, from hot-air balloon to vintage aircraft. from super-hero soaring to ski jumping. Mama is steamed. Enough of this silliness. Autumn is coming. She's ready to fly to Florida--soon. Baby suggests alternate means of travel--

Orange Blossom Special? Skateboard? Little Red Convertible?

Mama Robin decides it's time to stop this stonewalling and scare her litigious little fledgling straight!

Cat? (Yawn!) Dog? (Piece of cake!)

OWL?.... YIKES!!!!!!!

It's up, up, and away for this reluctant little launcher, in best-selling author-illustrator, Mark Teague's latest, Fly! (Beach Lane Books, 2019). Mama knows best in this terrific wordless story, and although simple enough for a savvy toddler who understands the concept of speech bubbles, preschoolers can "read" this one with ease, and even older kids will giggle at the graphic absurdities and the subtleties of this war of the wills.

Teague, the illustrator of Cynthia Rylant's top-selling  Poppleton series, Teague's own Mrs. LaRue series, and Jane Yolen's uber-popular How Do Dinosaurs... (see reviews here), is a modern master of illustrative humor, and as Publishers Weekly's starred review says, "Teague proves that a picture can be worth a thousand words--and almost as many laughs."

Better to Have Loved and Lost...: Found by Jeff Newman and Larry Day

In the frontispiece pages, a young girl looks down from her apartment's rain-spattered window and spots a little shaggy brown puppy wandering in the rain in the dark alley below.

She fetches him inside and up the stairs to her room, where a bulletin board shows a poster of a big black and white dog.

MISSING
PRUDENCE

From a basket under her bed the girl pulls out a dog dish which says PRUDENCE and plaid-cushioned dog bed and empties a bag of dog food into the dish for the puppy. When she returns from brushing her teeth, she sees that the puppy has pulled out Prudence's red ball and leash.

It's a sad moment that reminds her of her lost dog, but the girl climbs into bed. The puppy persists until he finally climbs into bed and sleeps with her.

The next day is a getting-to-know-you day as the new dog and girl play together, and soon she visits the pet store for a new collar and toy for her new dog. But on a pole outside the store she sees a lost dog poster with tear-off phone numbers.

LOST!
ROSCOE
Return to 207 South Melvin

The dog she has found is surely the lost Roscoe. What should she do? That night she hugs Roscoe through the night, but the next day she takes him to 207 South Melvin and returns him to an overjoyed boy.

Doing the right thing is hard, but on the way home she passes the animal shelter where a lonely bulldog's eyes meet hers. He puts his paw up to the glass as their eyes meet. Is her heart big enough for yet another dog?

"It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all," says the old saw, and a happy ending is hinted at in the closing endpapers of Jeff Newman's and Larry Day's lovely little wordless story of lost and found dogs, Found (Simon and Schuster, 2018). Larry Day's illustrations are striking, done in pen and ink outlines with color added only where it helps to tell the story, in the girl's red raincoat and boots, Prudence's old red ball and Roscoe's new blue one, the brown storefront shelter and the brown and white bulldog inside as girl and dog reach out to the window together. This time it's a happy ending for both children and both dogs, one that quietly says a lot about love and loss. A beautiful story and beautiful book. "A story that will break hearts so it can put them back together," says Kirkus, in their starred review.

The Power of the Book: Red Again by Barbara Lehman

On a snowy street beside an icy ocean a bespectacled boy peddling his bike spots a small, square, red book dropped on the gray paving stones of the street. He picks it up and peddles to his row house overlooking the sea and climbs to the top floor, a glassed-in observation tower complete with telescope. There, succeeding pages in the red book zoom in on an green island where a girl is fishing from her rowboat. Floating up to her is ... a red book.

The girl opens the book to see... a row of city houses, one with a tall glass tower. Successive page turns and panels focus closer as she sees a figure seated in the tower and then, in a closeup, the boy with his red book, open to a page picturing her, looking at a picture of him... looking at her, with the suggestion of consecutively smaller pictures of themselves, ad infinitum.

The girl's book shows the boy looking back at her with his book open to a picture of himself, looking at her looking at him.... Using a baguette in her basket as bait, she hitches a ride with a pelican which tows her toward the boy, in her haste dropping her book into the sea.

From his tower, the boy sees her boat approaching through his telescope and waves to greet her, accidentally dropping the red book from his balcony to land on the roof of a delivery van passing below. As the girl moors her boat on the seawall and the boy helps her up to land, the van turns the corner, the book flies off, landing in a snow bank to be spotted by another girl who tucks it under her arm and with it runs for home to see what's inside....

Where do stories come from, and where do they go?

Readers familiar with the 2009 Caldecott Honor Book, The Red Book (Caldecott Honor Book) will recognize the boy on the bike as the one who found the red book on the last page of the first book, and Barbara Lehman's sequel, Red Again (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) picks right up with the visual joke as the magical book is left to be found by the original finder in the first book in a circular story that will delight and bemuse young readers. Even the title is a wordplay with the homophones "read" and "red," a little literary jest that will amuse older "readers," and to add to the fun of this wordless fantasy, author illustrator Lehman also makes use of the trompe l'oeil device of the infinite repeating picture of the boy looking at the picture of the girl looking at the picture of him looking at her. Together these two books bring disparate people together, and inevitably and  inadvertently they pass them on to be discovered yet again.

For another mind-expanding wordless picture book, share this one with the similarly themed amazing and amusing 2007 Caldecott-winning book, Flotsam, by David Wiesner. (Houghton Mifflin Clarion).

Where's Kitty? Spot, The Cat by Henry Cole

It's a lazy weekend afternoon, and a young boy is sprawled on the couch with his book, while his cat, white with one large black spot on his side, is stretched out on the back of the sofa. But the cat is alert, switching his tail at a bird, sitting on a potted flower on the sill of the open window.

Suddenly the bird flies, and unbeknownst to his young owner, the cat leaps after him, onto the window sill.

Outside, the cat cannily makes its way down the branches of an tall, ornamental tree planted on the balcony below and from there leaps from balcony to the iron staircase balustrade and strolls across the busy street below.

Inside, the boy stirs and looks around for his cat on the sofa back. He peers out the window, he checks the kitchen, where the bowl, monogrammed SPOT, sits empty. Alarmed, the boy prints out some LOST CAT posters and dashes down to the street to post his signs hopefully. But he is too late to spot Spot the cat, who is down the next block, crossing the boat canal on yet another railing.

The cat dashes across a grassy park where kites of all kinds are in full flight, with the boy not too far behind. Outside the huge museum (where a sign "CATS" proclaims an exhibit inside) the cat sits to watch a child. But where's Spot? The boy quickly passes out his posters as he passes the fire station, while at the end of the block, a spotted dog jerks at his leash and the cat accelerates from stroll to full speed flight.

In the vast domed lobby of a railroad station, the cat seems to disappear in the milling throng of passengers pulling luggage. Wait! Is that Spot, heading out one exit?

In a tour de force execution of the Where's Waldo? premise, noted artist Henry Cole's Spot, the Cat (Little Simon, 2016) even plays with his title, as the book becomes a game of Spot the Cat, in which each page becomes a challenge to locate the wandering cat. Taking the place of text, Cole's illustrations are remarkable, done in meticulous black and white pen-and-ink drawings in which crosshatching and enticing cityscape detail camouflage each stage of the jaunty feline's outdoor adventure. Cole's busy urban scenes bustle with the almost audible sounds of honking horns, barking dogs, and rumbling traffic.

All ends well, of course, with the homing kitty beating the mournful boy back home, where both of them share a much-needed cuddle and nap on that sofa. And for those sharp-eyed readers who relish a visual puzzle, it's a good Saturday afternoon adventure for all. As Kirkus Reviews says, "Finding the feline is tricky for readers, too, as the artist inserts many red herrings. When child and cat finally reunite, the sweet relief feels immediate and intimate--and all that looking so very much worth it."

And for those kids who dote on the "The Cat Came Back" theme, this one pairs well with Kate Banks' City Cat (see review here).

Paper Chase: Float by Daniel Miyares

A cloudy summer afternoon and some scrap paper are the beginning of something big. A boy's dad shows him how to fold the traditional cocked-hat paper boat.

And just in time! It begins to rain lightly, opening up possibilities, and clad in bright yellow slicker and hood, the boy steps out into the gray drizzle, sheltering his boat from the damp. The storm builds into a downpour, hiding the boy in a blur of gray rainfall and blurry yellow raincoat. But then the shower passes, leaving deep puddles just right for splashing and a beguiling rivulet along the curb. The boy launches his boat.

It floats! As the wide porches and peaked roofs of his street are reflected upside down in the flow, the little barque sails along, picking up speed as the flow of water seems to widen and deepen.

Oh! There's a reason for that building water power, as the boy sees his little boat disappear down the gratings of a storm drain. In a dramatic page view, the boat is seen from below the street, in the sudden waterfall, rushing downstream as the boy's reaching hand fails to catch it.

Listening to the water rushing beneath the street, the boy chases after, until he reaches an arched bridge. Looking down, he sees the rainwater torrent rushing out to join a small stream, and, soggy and shapeless, the remains of his boat.

Sadly the boy fishes it out of the tangle of flotsam along the bank and heads home. The rain is gone and so is his boat.

But back home, there are a dry tee and shorts, a blow dry for his drippy hair and a hot drink with Dad, and the two pull out more paper. His father patiently show him how to shape one sheet into another familiar pattern... a paper airplane.

Armed for more adventures, the boy opens the door. Silhouetted against the bright gold of the returned sun, he steps forward and lifts his aircraft high for its first flight.

Daniel Miyares' latest, Float (Simon and Schuster, 2015) is an artistic tour de force which without words expresses the joy of independent childhood imagination and adventure. Miyares' boy, evoking Ezra Jack Keats' iconic Peter in The Snowy Day and Raymond Briggs boy in The Snowman, is the center of a story with the perfect, (and sometimes lost) balance of loving adult guidance and freedom of experience in the out-of-doors. Miyares' illustrations, an essay in grays from varying perspectives, are highlighted only by small squares of color on the recycled paper and by the dramatic bright yellow of the boy's slicker, at the end repeated brilliantly in the golden doorway which opens to beckoning adventures on the final page. Wordlessly but eloquently, Miyares portrays the world outside, the houses and streets as both orderly and intriguing, a place where a child can go to find experience, wonder, and joy. An amazing book, simple yet profound, with much to offer. Publishers Weekly says, "It’s a moment of childhood captured in multiple dimensions." Watch for this one at award time!

And as a special bonus, Miyares' endpapers offer diagrams for making paper boats and airplanes.