Impromptu World Tour: Bye, Penguin by Seou Lee

A trip around the world was the last thing that little Penguin was thinking about when he caught a big fish for breakfast.

All the big penguins watched approvingly from their large snowy iceberg as Little Penguin grabs the fish with a quick... snap 'n' snick!

But the slightest movement has a big consequence. The promontory upon which he stands snaps off and his link with the family is severed and begins to drift slowly away. Aghast, with his catch half-swallowed, he sees his iceberg home become further and further away, smaller and smaller in the distance.

He cries for help. But like it or not, Little Penguin is caught in the current and is off on the float--or voyage-- of his life. As he floats through ice caves and watches the Northern Lights flash in the sky all around, Penguin sails al norte, past the Christ the Redeemer Statue on the mountain top at Rio de Janeiro, and floats north, riding the currents until he passes another huge statue, the Statue of Liberty. He sees one the famous cathedrals of Europe and finally drifts south, past the famed Opera House of Sydney and in and among the islands of the East Indies. It's been an interesting trip!

But the little Penguin looks down and notices that his ice floe has become more like an shrinking ice platter. Now what? But he swaps places with a surfer and continues his trip on the surf board until....  he see rising something familiar ahead of him in the now chilly icy ocean.

It's around the world and back again right where he started from for this well-travelled little Penguin, in Seou Lee's happy, wordless story, Bye, Penguin! (Levine Querido, 2020). Lee's artistry is seen in the subtle facial expressions of  her little character and his look-alike family as his story comes back where it started--home again! There's no place like home, as Dorothy famously said in The Wizard of Oz (Puffin Classics), as Penguin, now not so little, surfs right up to his home berg, proudly wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a lei. Bon Voyage!

For more traveling penguin yarns, see my reviews here.

Lost! Wolf in the Snow by Matthew Cordell

Lost in the snow!

A young girl leaves school just as a snow storm sets in. Head down under her hood, she trudges across a seemingly endless snowfield, until she meets up with a tiny baby wolf, separated from his mother and pack, his little legs sinking deep into the soft new snow. Despite her own obvious struggle with the drifting snowfall, she picks him up and tucks him under her coat and moves on toward her home. The little wolf lets out a small sound.

Howl! Howl!

Then the girl hears an arresting reply:

HOOOOOOOWWLLL! HOOOOOOWWLLL!

Fearfully she looks about. She sees that wolves are approaching her, led by Mama Wolf.

The girl tenderly puts the little wolf down so that his mother can carry him back to his pack.

Stumbling, the girl goes on, desperately slogging forward, leaning against the wind until she collapses in the snow. Suddenly, she is surrounded by the wolves.

The little wolf comes up to her and licks her hand, and the other wolves sit down and begin to howl together around her. But she is not afraid. The wolves' howls are answered by her own dogs! She's almost home!

BARK! BARK!

And no one is lost in the snow at last, in Matthew Cordell's Caldecott Award book, Wolf in the Snow (Feiwel and Friends, 2017), a beautiful story of one good deed deserving another. Cordell's wispy, scratchy illustrations portray the bleak wintry snowscape with a spare loveliness that both reinforces and ameliorates the bleak setting, symbolically warmed by the child's bright red cloak. "It's an almost wordless tale which speaks volumes about kindness. The girl's story is a hero's journey, and Cordell tells it with skill and heart," says Publishers Weekly, in its starred review.

A Farmer and a Clown Have A Very Good Day: The Farmer and the Clown by Marla Frazee

In a landscape surrounded by a whole lot of nothing, an angular farmer is grimly spearing some hay bales with his pitchfork, when out of the corner of his eye, he sees something colorful in motion.

It is a circus train in the distance, and as it bounces over the plains, he see something (someone?) fall from the caboose.

He hurries toward the place and sees that it's a little clown, in a red suit, peaked cap, with a big clown smile.

What to do? The farmer leads the little one toward the farmhouse, shows the small clown how to wash up, and gives him some dinner. With his big red smile washed away, the little clown looks small and sad, so the farmer tries to coax a small smile with some hat tricks with his wide black hat.

The next day the farmer sets off with the little clown on his shoulders. Together they milk the cow and feed the chickens, and the farmer shows off again, juggling the eggs from their nests, as the little guy laughs. They take a picnic out on the prairie and have a fine time together.

But then they hear a sound:

TOOT! TOOT! TOOT!

The circus train has come back for the little clown! The clown family on the train waves happily, and the little clown jumps for joy to see them. But then, he turns to the tall farmer and, wrapping his arms around the farmer, hugs him tightly. The farmer gives him a kiss and a wave, but the little clown has something else he wants to do: he gives the farmer his tall red hat, and the farmer gives him his wide black hat as a remembrance as well, and the farmer, wearing the red cap, begins the long walk back--alone again. Or is he?

Marla Frazee's newest, The Farmer and the Clown (Beach Lane, 2014), is a wordless picture book that says a lot. In a still, dun-colored landscape, a bit of life and color comes into the old farmer's world and leaves him changed. Frazee's two characters, small in the perspective of an endless "greige" landscape, speak multitudes about loneliness and longing. Multiple Caldecott honors (for All the World and A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever) testify to Frazee's mastery of a variety of styles to say a lot with a little. Sharp-eyed "readers" will spot a surprise for the farmer when he looks back that forecasts some fun ahead, a wry touch that ends this book on the upbeat.

New York Times reviewer and author Grace Lin says, "An artist of a wordless picture book must be meticulous, carefully using the tools of color and composition to elicit an emotional experience just as a poet uses words. Marla Frazee's The Farmer and the Clown accomplishes this lofty goal beautifully…the entire book, with Frazee's perfect pacing of images and use of negative space, light and shadow, is true poetry."

Birdy V. Worm: Early Birdy Gets the Worm by Bruce Lansky

A baby bird, the only one awake, peers over the edge of the nest. What is Mama doing down there? She's pulling a delicious-looking worm out of a worm hole!  Hey!  Is it breakfast time?

Birdy has to try that for himself. He hops over the edge of the nest and flutters perilously down to the ground. Now, where are the worms?

He spots something long and skinny and grabs it in his beak and pulls. But this worm is not cooperating. It pulls back. In fact, it is pulling him into the air. Wait! That's not a worm. It's a kite string!

Early Birdy is not ready to be airborne just yet, so he lets go. Now, where is a real worm?

He sees something long and pink in the hollow at the bottom of a tree trunk. Birdy is on it in a flash! Unfortunately, the long pink thing turns out to have a rather angry mouse at the other end, one now with a sore tail.  Uh, sorry!  Have a good day!

Finally Early Birdy spots a real worm crawling across the ground. Unfortunately, a BIG bluejay spots it at the same time. There's a brief tug-of-war over the stretchy worm, with the inevitable result. Bluejay flys away with his worm, and Early Birdy flops into a faceful of dirt.

Things only get worse when Birdy sees a boy with a can of worms. The little fisherman takes one out and does something with some string, and Early Birdy makes his move for the worm, only to find himself sailing out over the pond holding fast to the worm on a fish hook.

What's a guy got to do to get some grub around here?

In his latest Picture Reading Book for Young Children, Early Birdy Gets the Worm: A PictureReading Book for Young Children (Meadowbrook Press, 2014), author Bruce Lansky and artist Bill Bolton have a wordless story with just enough slapstick humor and tension to take little ones through the story on their own after an initial parental run-through.  Bolton's comic watercolor illustrations are charming, while clearly "telling" the story through his characters' facial expressions and body language. Available in board book and e-book format, this one offers the youngest "readers" the chance to create their own narration each time they open the book.

Lansky's other tales for tots include his fractured nursery verse collections, Mary Had a Little Jam and Other Silly Rhymes and Peter, Peter, Pizza-Eater: And Other Silly Rhymes, and his Baby Genius board book series.

Without A Word: Journey by Aaron Becker

It is a sepia sort of day, on a drab street where even the traffic light can't quite manage to be red. A lonely girl slumps on the stoop in a tableau in which the only color is her red scooter leaning against the stairs and a red chalk in a boy's hand on the street.

Inside, Mom yaks on the kitchen phone and stirs up something in a large stew pot. The girl takes her red kite hopefully to Dad, who is hunched over his computer. Her sister ignores her red ball as she punches at her iPad. Ignored. the girl flops like an abandoned rag doll on her bed. But when her snoozing cat suddenly stirs and stalks out the door, the girl sees a red chalk in the spot the cat just left.

Suddenly animated, the girl draws a rounded red door on her wall. It opens and she runs through it, emerging from a wide and tall tree into a green-gray forest lit by Japanese lanterns, where she follows a road to a stream. There she draws herself a red rowboat, and the adventure is on.

Down canals to a fairy-tale castle she floats, and inside a walled citadel, where a series of locks lift her boat higher and higher, until a sluice ends in a waterfall. Improvising as she falls, the girl draws a red hot air balloon, which floats over a series of robotic steampunk vehicles and armored defenders,
until she spots an imprisoned rose-colored bid of paradise. Freeing it from its gilded cage, the girl lets it fly away as she is captured and herself imprisoned.

But the bird returns, bearing in its beak--the red chalk,  with which the girl draws a crimson flying carpet, which flies back to the door in the tree, which opens out as the postman's locked door on a mailbox, back onto the sepia street, where she meets the boy, this time with a rose-colored chalk to match the bird. Together they draw two circles which become a tandem bike which takes them (and the bird) away together, page right, into what the reader supposes to be more adventures.

In a medium such as mine, made for words, where there is no dialogue to quote and the only illustration allowed is a book cover, it is hard to do justice to a book like Aaron Becker's Journey (Candlewick Press, 2013). But now that Becker's little tour de force has been awarded a Newbery Honor Medal, it is getting the attention it deserves. Becker's illustrations are inventive, with ordinary story book people, in an almost surrealistic world that reveals more than is usually seen. Becker's story moves inerrantly left to right. Walls can be solid or transparent to what lies inside or below, and his paintings of the castle and the cloud-borne mechanical inhabitants are quite detailed, quaint, yet surprising. It is a modern, dreamlike outing built upon the same premise as Crockett Johnson's classic Harold and the Purple Crayon, 50th Anniversary Edition (Purple Crayon Books) a quite avant garde piece of meta-fantasy in its own time in its own way. Becker's fantasy takes advantage of the advances in picture book art and printing since, which allow stunning layouts and almost cinematographic movement, while keeping the same sense of childlike openness to imagination and adventure.

"A masterwork," says The New York Times. "An imaginative adventure story whose elaborate illustrations inspire wonder, careful examination and multiple reads," adds Kirkus Reviews.

Both Sides Now: Inside Outside by Lizi Boyd

Lizi Boyd's Inside Outside (Chronicle Books, 2013) is a book that is much more than it seems at first glance.

Using brown butcher paper as her medium, Boyd opens with a plain house, a small boy seen through the window as a snowman stands guard just outside, while inside he works, intent upon planting seedlings for spring. Pictures on the wall show plants and trees which foreshadow the season to come.  The seasons change outside. as the boy moves out and then back into the house. Trees leaf out, flowers comes up and bloom, and birds appear in the trees, nesting and then feeding their babies.

Accompanied by his constant companions, a black dog and two mice who get on with their own parallel lives, unmindful of the events around them, the boy flies his kite in spring, finds a turtle in the warming pond, tends his garden, and fills his wading pool for the dog and cat to enjoy.

The scenes shift from inside to outside and back again, each move prefigured by the other, with the boy building a boat inside while sailboats float in pictures on the wall, and takes it outside to sail it on the pond while the turtle and dog watch from his beach towel. Fall comes, suggested first by the boy's paintings of autumn trees on the walls and carried outside as colored leaves float down from the trees and birds fly, fleeing south from approaching winter.

At last it is winter outside again, and the boy is seen through the windows, decorating a little evergreen inside, as snow falls on his snowman outside.

Cleverly placed die-cut rectanglar windows give little readers a chance to predict what comes next in this endlessly inventive essay on the seasons. It will take many look-throughs to take in all that is going on in Inside Outside. This seemingly simple little wordless story book has surprises and much to observe for youngsters just learning to "read" a picture book through its illustrations.

"... creative genius at work," says Kirkus Reviews.

In Plain View: Where's Walrus? by Stephen Savage

Just another daybreak at the zoo--the animals bored and motionless in their confines, a snoozing keeper sagging in his chair outside his guardhouse--but a with-it walrus in his pool is eying a serendipitously open gate.

In the turn of a page the walrus is out of there, and the rotund mustachioed guard, clutching a ineffectually small dog-catcher-type net, is in hot pursuit.

Where's Walrus?

Walrus, of course, is right there, motionlessly mimicking the entrance fountain's other stone mermaid, invisible to the hapless keeper.

The search goes on with the next turn of a page, where the walrus is invisible in plain sight, one of a row of gray-suited, black-derbied coffee drinkers seated on identical stools at the counter of mid-century diner. The keeper looks straight past him without recognition, while Walrus favors us with a gleefully conspiratorial look.

With each new page the walrus blends into the busy city scene--a line of identical hard-hatted bricklayers, one of three frou-froued mannikins in a millinery shop, a red-hatted firefighter bravely holding a spouting fire hose aimed at a conflagration, a high-kicking chorine in a musical hall revue, and one of a row of landscape painters at their easels in the park. In each scene our hero, so obviously a walrus, yet manages to blend in with the cookie-cutter forms of the people engage in daily activities in a static but vital cityscape.

The befuddled zookeeper grows more exasperated, and the walrus plainly enjoys his game of cat and mouse--until, hiding amidst a line of red-capped high divers, he just has to stand out from the crowd with an amazing double flip dive--and his cover is blown, just as the zookeeper suddenly sees, not just his quarry, but the possibilities of his talented charge. The final spread shows Walrus, back where he belongs, but with a high diving pool where his finally gets the attention he deserves.

Steven Savage's new Where's Walrus? (Scholastic, 2011) appears to be a simple picture puzzle book for small children, and it is. But its simple lines and flat color belie the retro sophistication of its Adobe Illustrator computerized art. Playfully spoofing the Where's Waldo? premise in his skillful manipulation of color, form, and line, Savage achieves just the right trompe l'oeil effect for his target audience with a touch of humor to please any age reader. A wordless picture book which is the last word.

Kirkus Reviews says "Refreshing, captivating, elegant and witty!"
Yeah. What he said.

A Day at the Beach: Wave by Susie Lee

The essence of what a picture book should be--Suzy Lee's brilliant, beautiful Wave, a story without words which speaks volumes, recreates the joy of a first encounter with the ocean's waves.

Executed in simple, almost primitive, charcoal pencil lines in dusky gray and black against a bright white background, the pages are lit up with the brilliant but soft blue of the ocean, its motion rendered evocatively with simple variations of color and swirls of foam. Into this scene comes a small girl, sturdy legs and windblown hair rendered in a few deft lines, watched over benevolently by her mother from the shade of her umbrella and by a line of five seagulls facing windward.

Approaching the edge, the girl retreats hastily from the first breaking wave, but she and the gulls quickly regroup as she ventures into the wet sand and puts a tentative toe into the wavelet as it rolls backward. Reassured, she splashes and twirls in the shallows.

But suddenly a giant wave begins to roll in. Temporarily frozen in the face of the curling, looming wave, girl and birds turn and flee up the shore's slope. At what she thinks a safe distance, the girl turns and saucily sticks out her tongue at the rogue wave. "You can't get me," she seems to be saying.

Then the wave breaks all over her, in a mass of roiling, splashing, swirling blue water, and just as hastily recoils, leaving the girl drenched and sitting, bottom sinking into the soft, wet sand, with her hair dripping and her legs stretched out before her.

But all round she sees what the wave has left for her--dozens of shells and even a living starfish--and she soon is gathering the bounty and calling to her mom to see what the sea has brought her. As her mother, umbrella folded and beachbag packed, comes down to the marge to gather her daughter and her treasures, the girl returns the starfish to the shallows, and then, turning to wave goodbye to the ocean and soaring gulls, heads home, salty, sandy, and happy.

It's everything a first day at the beach should be. Wave, is a little gem of a book which will appeal to all ages for its spare, sheer beauty and its wordless portrayal of childhood joy.

Story with A-Peel: Once Upon a Banana by Jennifer Armstrong and David Small

In a wordless picture book sure to please devotees of the I Spy genre, Jennifer Armstrong has luckily teamed up with Caldecott Medalist David Smalls to create a hilarious chain reaction street saga.

The story begins with a street performer juggling for passers-by just as his monkey takes it on the lam. In the first two-page spread, which precedes the title page, as the monkey heads for the tempting bananas on a grocer's sidewalk display and his owner gives chase, we see a gawking waiter spilling soup on a diner's lap. While the storekeeper berates the juggler, the monkey tosses the peel to the sidewalk, and a bunch of aloof cats look on from a fire escape, we see a couple of over-the-hill motorcyclists looking to park their bike. One of the cyclists slips on the peel, knocking down a painter on a long ladder who lands in the shopping cart of a muscle-bound pedestrian who never misses a word on his cell as he joins in the angry crowd.

Traffic snarls, horns honk, dogs get loose from two dog walkers, and a bicyclist is upended in short order. As the cyclist loses his shoes, violating the dress code (NO BARE FEET) at City Hall where he lands, a discombobulated judge steps onto a boy's skateboard, careening through an underpass and sending a baby in a carriage airborne as the hysterical mother and frenzied dogs give chase.

Just as the juggler reaches up to grab his monkey from atop a pay phone, the baby comes down safely into his arms, the irate diner gets his second bowl of soup (right in his lap, of course), and the horde giving chase arrives at the intersection where it all started, just in time to dodge a garbage truck colliding with a delivery van loaded with replacement bananas. It's an instant banana-rama street party with free bananas all around. The dog walkers flirt with each other, the dogs make friends, the street performer juggles bananas, and, of course, the cats watch the whole scene from their balcony.

Kids will love spotting the next potential victims of the fray as they unknowingly move into the scene, and it will take readers more than a few times through the book to observe all the humorous details. A map with key of the story forms the endpapers to help the reader follow the action from incident A to incident Q. It's all in good fun, with a Rube Goldberg-type lesson in cause and effect as a bonus.

Once Upon A Banana (Simon & Schuster, 2006) was named an ALA Notable Book for 2007.