Carrot Stalks: Creepy Carrots by Aaron Reynolds

JASPER RABBIT COULDN'T GET ENOUGH CARROTS...

And it's a craving that is easy to feed, since he walks right by Crackenhopper Fields on his way to school and baseball practice and back every day. Jasper rips them up, yanks them up, and snatches several every time he passes, gnawing and chomping on them with gusto.

... UNTIL THEY STARTED FOLLOWING HIM.

It's not just that he hears scary sounds, a sinister tunktunktunk, behind him on the way home after dark.

THAT NIGHT, AS HE WAS BRUSHING HIS TEETH, THERE THEY WERE!

In the mirror, Jasper sees three creepy, gap-toothed carrots peering malevolently from behind the shower curtain.

But when he whirls around, there's nothing on the side of the bathtub but an orange rubber ducky, a orange washcloth, and and a tall orange shampoo bottle.

The shape-shifting root veggies stalk him everywhere, always managing to morph into innocent orange objects--orange-handled hedge shears, an orange sand bucket, a discarded orange soda can. Obligingly, an obviously skeptical Dad helps him search the house for rapacious root veggies, with no results. His parents insist it's all nothing more than his overgrown imagination. But Jasper knows he's right!

CREEPY CARROTS WERE COMING FOR HIM!

Then Jasper comes up with a personal plan of action. Those vampire veggies can't come for him if they can't get out of their garden.

Jasper carefully measures their plot, builds a tall brick wall around the carrot patch, and digs a moat surrounding the garden--even stocking the moat with hungry (presumably vegetarian) 'gators.

WHEW!

Jasper feels safe and secure at last.

But Jasper is not the only one who is celebrating. Down at Crackenhopper Field, there's a partying group of secure carrots who now KNOW NO FEAR.

Artist Peter Brown, illustrator of Aaron Reynolds' Creepy Carrots! (Simon & Schuster, 2012) was awarded a 2013 Caldecott Honor Medal at last month's American Library Association Youth Media Awards for his clever tale of carrot stalkers.  Brown's Jasper is the usual rabbity kid character, shown in gloomy gray scale drawings, but his vindictive and vengeful carrots are cleverly comic, with just a trace of menace to them. Brown uses orange only for the carrots and their orangish alter egos, making this tale of possibly carnivorous carrots a mock-horror story of much wit and humor.

The Hoarder! Too Many Carrots by Katy Hudson

RABBIT LOVED CARROTS!

RABBIT WAS PROUD OF HIS COLLECTION AND BURROWED THEM AWAY IN HIS COZY HOLE.

BUT RABBIT HAD A PROBLEM. A BIG PROBLEM.

A rabbit's gotta right to crave carrots.

But there can be too much of a good thing, and Rabbit's collection has reached critical mass!

His burrow has so many carrots that he has to burrow into his burrow through the veggies. And trying to sleep surrounded, top, bottom, and on both sides by pointy root vegetables? Fahgeddaboudit.

Carrots are falling out of his mail slot, and his roof is bulging through with carrots and more carrots.

"I NEED A PLACE TO SLEEP!" RABBIT TOLD TORTOISE.

Tortoise offers to share his house, but, problem is, his shell is his house!

Rabbit gives it the old college try, squeezing and wiggling his way inside Tortoise's snug shell. But the fit is so tight that the two-headed tortoise shell tumbles out of control.

Tortoise's attempt to crash with Torty sends them rolling downhill and then...CRASH! into a rock.

Rabbit tries out Bird's nest, but when he tries to nest along with his carrots...CRACK! goes Bird's branch.

When the bough breaks, down comes Bird's nest, carrots and all!

Squirrel takes pity on his rodent cousin and invites Rabbit and the rest of the now homeless friends to bring their bedrolls for a sleepover in his commodious hollow tree. But soon the overstuffed trunk splits, cracks, and crashes, and the four footloose friends are forced to split the scene posthaste. Beaver offers his stick-built waterfront home beside the pond, but a flash flood floats them all away, carrots and all.

Beaver, Squirrel, Bird, Tortoise AND Rabbit are all washed up, embedded in a mud bank. Is it time for Rabbit to reconsider the merits of carrot collecting?

Which brings up a new problem. What to do with too many carrots? Where's Bugs Bunny when you need him?

There is one way, and Katy Hudson's newest, Too Many Carrots (Capstone Young Readers, 2016), ends with a jolly potluck supper, with Rabbit providing all the carrot cake, carrot casserole, carrot juice, and carrot soup that the gang can gobble.

And then all the buddies bunk down in the only house left standing--and plenty roomy--Rabbit's Burrow!

It seems Rabbit now has too many roomies--but that's a story for another day!

Katy Hudson's clever narrative turns upside down the old premise of "there's always room for one more," in a funny story of true friends adorned with rambunctiously detailed pen-and-ink (with plenty of orange paint) illustrations in a wry and witty look at the downside of too much of a good thing.

This rabbit tale begs to be paired up with Aaron Reynolds' Caldecott Honor Book, Creepy Carrots! (Read my review here).

Bunnicula Returns? Big Bunny by Rowboat Watkins

Once upon a time, there was a BIG BUNNY.

So begins the purported bedtime story, as parent and child cuddle cozily together in bed under a carrot-printed coverlet. Time for little bunnies to settle down to beddy-bye?

Not exactly. This BIG BUNNY is not cut out to be a warm and fuzzy bedtime bunny. In this fractured bedtime story, the young one, seeking something scary, kidnaps the main character, the would-be centerpiece of this nighty-night tale. He interrupts....

A ginormously SCARY bunny?

The parent tries to continue the narration of a regular big bunny who lives, not on a gigantic carrot asteroid careening in space, but a regular, round planet and eats, not monstrous carrots, but just nice normal orange carrots, not too small, carrots that...

When do we get to the SCARY part?

The storyteller tries to beef up the tale, allowing his Big Bunny to have terrible manners, eating ten carrots at a time, swallowing them whole. Truckloads of carrots....

Does Big Bunny EAT the trucks?

The narrator nixes any suggestions that the trucks have more taste and crunch, but does allow a concession, giving them a horrible fate--stuck in traffic-- requiring the penguins who drive the trucks to construct bridges to give them a way out of the jam.

Penguins drive trucks? This story is WORSE than traffic!

By this time, this bedtime bunny story is well on its way to becoming the story of the Big Bunny Who Ate Cleveland, or whatever city it is that he wants to crunch! The beleaguered storyteller objects, speaking with the voice of reason....

BUILDINGS AREN'T EDIBLE!

I wouldn't tell Big Bunny that.

By this time, our young storyline pirate has totally taken over the whole plotline, in Rowboat Watkins' bizarre bedtime story, Big Bunny (Chronicle Books, 2018). And, sure enough, there's still a surprise in Watkins' next-to-last two-page spread where the, um, crunchy identity of the two storytellers is revealed and a really SCARY conclusion is, well, foreshadowed! Rowboat Watkins' picture books are cleverly conceived and illustrated with an iconic and ironic sense of humor that pleases young readers. "The infectious fun continues to the ending, which will be—trust me—a giant, hilarious surprise to both parents and kids," says The New York Times Book Review.

Share this one with Watkin's weird hit story, Rude Cakes (see review here) and do not miss this chance to read the Aaron Reynolds' Caldecott-winning Creepy Carrots! and Creepy Pair of Underwear! (reviews here).

Oh, No, Green Glow! Creepy Pair of Underwear by Aaron Reynolds

Jasper Rabbit needed new underwear.

There's no alternative for undies, so Mom and Jasper are off to the Underwear Store. Mom grabs the last three packs of Plain White, thinking this trip is going to blissfully, er, brief.

But then Jasper sees them.

CREEPY UNDERWEAR.

So creepy! They were glorious!

In Day-Glo Green, with a Frankenstein face glowering on the front, they are perfect! Mom thinks they're too creepy for her bunny, but Jasper insists.

I'm not a little bunny any more! I'm a big rabbit!

Jasper can't wait to wear the creepy skivvies. He wears them to bed. But despite repetition of his "big bunny" mantra, the green and ghoulish glow of his lower half creeps Jasper out. Even piling a pillow over his face can't keep the creepy green glow out of his eyes.

Jasper skins out of the spooky pants and stuffs them into the bottom of the laundry hamper, but the glow in his room remains just as greenish and ghoulish as before. Finally Jasper falls into a fretful sleep, but when he wakes up, he finds that he is wearing the creepy briefs again. Is there a curse on his keister?

Jasper tries everything to rid himself of the dreadful drawers. He cuts them up into glowing green bits. But no matter where he stashes them, they return, back on his tushie, still ghoulishly green and glowing. He even mails them to China, only to receive them back in record time, with souvenirs--a pair of chopsticks and a toy panda! Finally Jasper slogs out at midnight with a shovel to bury the creepy underwear deep in a hole on the top of the distant Crookhanger Hill.

At last he drags himself into bed, switches off his bedside light, and lies down in the dark room with a satisfied smile. It's total darkness at last! Only....

It was REALLY DARK in there!

Jasper finds that even for a big rabbit, there can be too much of a good thing, and now there's way too much darkness in his bedroom. Will the Creepy Underwear have a return booking on his bottom?

There's a tiny bit of horror and and a lot of humor in Aaron Reynolds' Creepy Pair of Underwear! (Simon and Schuster, 2017), and a plenty of underpants-spurred hilarity is sure to ensue when young readers hear or read this spookypants tale.

Artist Peter Brown, who earned a Caldecott Honor Award for his collaboration with Aaron Reynolds in Creepy Carrots! (see review here), outdoes himself in this one. His uniformly grayscale illustrations, lighted only by the green glow of the seemingly possessed underpants, sets the stage well, alternating full-page illustrations with panels that build suspense. His Underwear Store is everything it should be--row after row of square tables with neat stacks of briefs, and when Jasper finally settles down to sleep and turns off his light, the next page turn reveals a double-page spread of nothing but... flat black. Brown also adds plenty of sight gags, changing the monster face on the briefs slightly, even down to the one back from China, matching the changing looks on poor Jasper's face. This new undie tale from Reynolds and Brown is doubtless destined to be the top hit of this year's spooky season.

The Envelope, Please! 2013 Newbery and Caldecott Awards

The American Library Association is announcing their prestigious Youth Media Awards, including their most-famous medals for youth fiction and picture books, today. This year's Caldecott Award, given to the best-illustrated book, is the seventy-fifth annual such award. I'll be live-blogging the winners as they are made public.

The winning titles were announced and livestreamed beginning at 8:00 a.m. PST (11:00 a.m. EST).

And here they are!

The 2013 Caldecott Medal goes to Jon Klassen for his This Is Not My Hat.(See my recent review here:)

Caldecott Honor Awards go to illustrator Aaron Reynolds for his Creepy Carrots!, Jon Klassen for his work on Extra Yarn, Laura Vaccaro Seeger for her Green, (see review here:)  David Smalls for his pictures for One Cool Friend, (review here) and Pamela Zagarenki for her illustrations in Sleep Like a Tiger.

The prestigious Newbery Medal goes to Katherine Applegate's The One and Only Ivan.

Newbery Honor Awards go to Laura Amy Schlitz for Splendors and Glooms, Bomb: The Race to Build--and Steal--the World's Most Dangerous Weapon by Steve Sheinkin, and Three Times Lucky by Sheila Turnage.

The Theodor Seuss Geisel Medal for the best beginning reader's book was awarded to Ethan Long's Up, Tall and High.

Geisel Honor Awards  were given to Mo Willem's Let's Go for a Drive! (An Elephant and Piggie Book), (see review here) Eric Litwin's Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons, (my review here) and Cece Ball's Rabbit and Robot: The Sleepover.

The Laura Ingalls Wilder Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Katherine Paterson, perhaps best known for her Bridge to Terabithia.

The Andrew Carnegie Medal for the most outstanding children's video goes to Video Productions' film, Anna. Emma and the Condors.

The Michael Printz Award for young adult fiction goes to Nick Lake's In Darkness.

The Pura Belpre' Awards for Latino children's literature go to illustrator David Diaz for Martin de Porres: The Rose in the Desert, (review here) and author Benjamin Sienz for Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (also the winner of the 2013 Stonewall Award.)

Taking the Siebert Award for the best informational book for children was Steve Sheinkin's Bomb: The Race to Build--and Steal--the World's Most Dangerous Weapon. The Batchelder Medal for the best foreign book for children translated to English went to My Family for the War by Anne Voorhoeve.

Receiving the Coretta Scott King Medals were Brian Collier for  his illustrations for Langston Hughes' I, Too, Am America.   and author Andrea Davis Pinkney for her Hand in Hand: Ten Black Men Who Changed America: Coretta Scott King Honor Awards went to illustrators Kadir Nelson for I Have a Dream (Book and CD),  Daniel Minter for Ellen's Broom, and Chris Myers' H.O.R.S.E.: A Game of Basketball and Imagination. King Fiction Honor Medals went to Vaunda Nelson's No Crystal Stair (Carolrhoda Ya) and to novelist Jacqueline Woodson's Each Kindness.

The 2013 Virginia Hamilton Lifetime Achievement Medal was presented to Demetria Tucker.

The YALSA Medal  was awarded to Andrea Davis Pinkney for her Hand in Hand: Ten Black Men Who Changed America.  Andrea Pinkney was also  named  to present  the  2013 Arbuthnot Lecture. YALSA's nonfiction honors went to Steve Sheinkin's Bomb: The Race to Build--and Steal--the World's Most Dangerous Weapon. making Sheinkin the informal 2013 triple crown winner

The Odyssey Award went to the audio book version of John Green's novel, The Fault in Our Stars produced by Brilliance Audio.

The Margaret A Edwards Medal for lifetime contributions of young adult literature was given to Tamora Pierce, and the William C. Morris new author award went to Rachel Hartman for her first novel, Seraphina.

The 2013 Alex Awards, given to ten adult books with special appeal to young adult readers, includes the National Book Award Youth Fiction winner, Louise Erdrich's The Round House. The complete list may be found here.

A Walk on the Wild Side: Mr.Tiger Goes Wild by Peter Brown

EVERYONE WAS PERFECTLY FINE WITH THE WAY THINGS WERE.

EVERYONE BUT MR. TIGER.

MR. TIGER WAS BORED WITH ALWAYS BEING SO PROPER.

Mr. Tiger lives in a clearly upright and uptight world. The cookie-cutter row houses are tall and narrow, uniformly grey and brown to match the inhabitants, who are dressed decorously in Victorian style, with small bustles for the ladies and long, tight-fitting frock coats for the gentlemen. Mr. Tiger himself is totally fitted out in impeccable haberdashery, from his tall top hat to his high-collar and tiny butterfly bow tie, with stiff-upper lip etiquette to match.

But when a few young ones make the slightest attempt at a romp, a passing horse, strolling sedately on her hind legs, lowers her lorgnette to admonish them earnestly:

"NOW CHILDREN, PLEASE DO NOT ACT LIKE WILD ANIMALS!"

But unlike his bland fellow pedestrians, Tiger's bright orange fur stands out in the crowd, and when he hears the lady warning the youngsters, he suddenly feels the same urge to break out of the mold. He drops down on all fours and has an immediate epiphany.  A small change in altitude brings a great change in attitude. Four legs are better than two! Tiger sheds his togs, leaps upon a rooftop, and lets out a full-throated ROAR! and takes off for the woodsy wilds where his inner beast leaps and lopes freely.

In his latest, Mr. Tiger Goes Wild (Little, Brown, 2013), Caldecott artist Peter Brown uses the picture book page, itself a metaphor for self-expression in a controlled environment, to emphasize his hero's urge to think outside the box, as the transformed Tiger strips to his stripes and and bounds, au naturel, off page right, for his walk on the wild side, where stylized rampant greenery surrounds him.

Brown's work as an illustrator, with its careful  draftsmanship set off with judicious use of orange, is perfect for this tale, in which Tiger finds the life of the solitary hunter lacks only one thing--a social network, and it seems that when Tiger returns to town in his flowery jacket, everyone else has decided to loosen their cravats and occasionally go quadrupedal themselves. Brown knows how to use the page turn as a delightfully dramatic device, and his juxtaposition of the dull-toned vertical world of the town with the glowing colors and flowing curves of the lateral landscape of the wilderness provides just the right contrast. Despite its stylistic sophistication and sly sociological premise, kids will giggle at Tiger's transformation and easily get the essence of this story, frequently compared by reviewers to Sendak's classic Where the Wild Things Are.

Peter Brown's other notable works include The Curious Garden, YOU WILL BE MY FRIEND! (Starring Lucille Beatrice Bear), and his Caldecott-winning illustrations for Creepy Carrots!