Heart-y! My Heart Is Like a Zoo by Michael Hall

MY HEART IS LIKE A ZOO!

EAGER AS A BEAVER.

STEADY AS A YAK.

HOPEFUL AS A HUNGRY HERON

FISHING FOR A SNACK.

Award-winning designer Michael Hall's first picture book effort, My Heart Is Like a Zoo (Greenwillow, 2009), constructs a menagerie of charming animals from overlapping hearts, set forth appealingly against solid-color double-page spreads. Although some of his text lines, all similes which compare heartfelt feelings to animal behavior, work better than others, the illustrations alone are so cleverly creative in their construction that they will hold the attention of preschool listeners and older readers throughout this book.

Particularly engaging is Hall's walrus, reclining massively but comfortably on a striped beach towel, head, bulky body, and front feet all inverted hearts, hind flippers formed from a recumbent heart--all instantly recognizable as this slow and stolid animal, with an appropriate caption...

... PEACEFUL AS A PORTLY WALRUS LOUNGING ON A TOWEL...

and followed by an equally clever clam, consisting of two hearts, one split down the middle and on its side to form the shell, and the second, peeping out to form the clam inside, with its line...

... COZY AS A CLAM...

The first reaction of youngsters will be to focus on the heart shapes in each collage-style illustration and to react to how, with a few snips and artful positioning, Hall creates the essence of each animal from just one basic shape, very much in the manner of Lois Ehlert's wonderful die-cut and color-blocked book, Color Zoo. Proving that his book is not mere eye candy, Hall adds an appealing appendix to the book which encourages number-loving kids to count the hearts in each illustration and even total them up ("over 300," promises the author).

To this celebration of shape, Hall also brings a brief language lesson in the use of similes, exploring feelings of the heart tied to well-known animals, as in "...quiet as a caterpillar wearing knitted socks." The book closes with a comfy kid, cozily sleeping while his zoo of heart-shaped animals keep watch from the shelf above his bed, making this warm and reassuring offering a good choice for both sleepy time and an exciting stimulus for classroom art and language and math activities.

HarperCollins rolls out the red carpet for this one with a delightfully animated trailer backed up by a toe-tapping tune, to be seen here:

Readers will definitely *heart* this brand-new delight, for Valentine's Day and all year round. A great introduction to the creative work of a very promising new author/illustrator!

What a Difference a Dot Makes! Little i by Michael Hall

WHEN LITTLE i'S DOT FELL OFF.... 1

IT ROLLED DOWN A HILL,

AND SPLASHED INTO THE SEA.

The rest of the alphabet is discombobulated. Little i didn't look like one of them anymore! He looked like a ... number! Weird!

"no way" said n and o and w, a, and y.

There is nothing for Little i to do but follow his missing dot as it is tossed away upon the waves. He finally made landfall and followed the beach all the way around the island, but everywhere he looked, his dot was NOT.

But there were exciting things to see as he searched. He saw a cascade of exclamation points, a garden of green sprouting commas, and a dazzling grotto of bright, gemlike asterisks. And beyond a scary bridge, what did he spot? His DOT.

BUT NOW, ODDLY, THE DOT FELT AWKWARD.

LITTLE i HAD GROWN TO LIKE BEING DOTLESS.

WHAT HAD LITTLE i BECOME?

Something had changed about Little i. Now he was...

A WORD.

"I," SAID BIG I!

Even little letters can can grow up and find themselves, in Michael Hall's latest, Little i (Greenwillow Books, 2017). Author-illustrator Michael Hall's trademark tissue collaged art is gorgeously colored, and his text takes on both typology and growing up, no small feat, sending his little letter out on an allegorical quest literally to find himself, while along the way introducing young readers to quite a few new punctuation marks--hyphens, exclamation points, and question marks, to name a few, with even his outgrown dot re-purposed as the absolutely essential period (which I will now put to use).

"Little i may be a mere cutout letter, but his humanity shines through,” says the New York Times Review."

Other books by Michael Hall which teach and delight are his Red: A Crayon's Story, Wonderfall, Perfect Square. and My Heart Is Like a Zoo. (see reviews here).

Shape Shifter: Perfect Square by Michael Hall

IT WAS A PERFECT SQUARE.

AND IT WAS PERFECTLY HAPPY.

With nothing more than a square--and a wiggly line, which forms the perfect square's opening proud grin--the creative Michael Hall is off again on an exploration of the possibilities of geometric shapes, this time limiting himself to the perfect square, solid, symmetrical, and, as we see, in the hands of a truly creative writer, endowed with endless possibilities.

To begin, Hall slices his square diametrically, producing large and smaller and smaller trapezoids and a couple of equilateral triangles, ventilated with round holes. But what can he make of those?

Why, a fountain--sprinkled with water bubbles, a refreshing idea.

On Tuesday, Hall takes the familiar square and tears it by hand into rough-edged strips, and of that and the line he grows a garden of long-stemmed flowers. Wednesday finds the square shredded to form the landscape of a park, complete with a kite in flight.

In turn the square is shattered into triangular shards to form a bridge, cut into strips to shape it into a river, and on Saturday it is crumpled and wrinkled to make itself into a mountain range. At last on Sunday, the square waits to see what the creator's hand will do next.

NOTHING HAPPENED.

ITS FOUR EQUAL SIDES WERE CONFINING.

ITS FOUR MATCHING CORNERS WERE RIGID AND CRAMPED.

But design master Michael Hall has one more surprise for the reader when the square's sad frown transforms itself into windowpanes--a window with quite a view of the full landscape created during the week.

Michael Hall, whose masterful creative hand made a menagerie of the much-misused heart shape in his notable My Heart Is Like a Zoo, gives the perfection of the square its due in his brand-new Perfect Square (Greenwillow, 2011), a book which is uniquely beautiful, a lesson in geometry, and a take-off point for endless art and craft activities as well. As Publishers Weekly puts it persuasively, "A smart lesson in thinking outside the box (or the square)."

Home Making: House Mouse by Michael Hall

ONE CHILLY MORNING, A MOUSE TRAVELED....

The Mouse climbed up and over a high hill, and paddled across a wide stream and wandered into a patch of wild asparagus, and spots ...

SOMETHING WARM AND WELCOME.

It was a warm, welcoming fire. But it needed something to keep it in, so she made...

A STOVE!

The stove keeps the fire going and the mouse went...

WHERE THE CHILLINESS WASN'T...

and the fox won't go near the place where the fire is. So Mouse builds a beautiful stone floor for the stove, and then a strong wooden roof to keep keep her fire dry and her asparagus soup simmering on the stove. But she still needs something.

And when one night when she heard a sound...

KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK,

Nobody was there until Mouse builds a strong wooden door to open. And at the door there were weary wanderers who needed to be inside, with a sack of veggies that needed making into soup.

And they did.

And the House Mouse is always happy to welcome all to sit by her warm fire, in author-illustrator Michael Hall's latest picture book, House Mouse (Harper/Greenwillow, 2021). In his trademark geometric mixed media art, Michael Hall has his character craft his own home to express the wise words that it takes a lot of living to make a house a home. Creating a home takes hard work and like a good soup, just the right ingredients and someone with whom to love the house and savor the soup.

Says Horn Book's reviewer, "Hall’s use of onomatopoeia and geometric shapes (a triangle for the mouse’s body; rectangles for the house’s frame and floor) naturally emphasize and extend the construction theme. . . . . This tale of a mouse and her house is aglow with tenacity, generosity, and good cheer.” For more of Michael Hall's storytelling magic, see some of his other noted pictured books, Wonderfall, and My Heart Is Like a Zoo and Red: A Crayon's Story.

I Gotta Be Me! RED: A Crayon's Story by Michael Hall

"First to thine own self be true," wrote Shakespeare, and in this colorful tale, "Red" has no choice in that matter. Despite the fact that his Crayola-ish wrapper looks red and clearly says RED, he has a reason to feel blue. He actually IS blue all the way through.

But his perky teacher seems oblivious to the obvious.

"I'LL DRAW RED STRAWBERRIES! THEN YOU CAN DRAW RED STRAWBERRIES!" SHE CHIRPED WITH FEIGNED ENTHUSIASM.

Teacher colors a row of red strawberries, and poor RED tries to do likewise, applying himself and pressing on with the task, but of course all his berries are blue.

Red's mom OLIVE tries to help. She arranges a playdate with little YELLOW, suggesting that they might like to combine their talents by coloring some oranges. Strangely, all of their fruits come out green! His grandparents, SILVER and GRAY, suggest he draw a self-portrait.

BUT IT SO WASN'T RED!

All his classmates are happy to offer their criticisms. Pencil pointedly suggests that RED just isn't sharp enough for the job.

"FRANKLY, I DON'T THINK HE'S TOO BRIGHT!" SAID FUCHSIA.

It seems that all of the crayons can't see beyond his label to the real RED, until he makes a new friend, BERRY, who recognizes his true hue and asks him to color the water for her boat. He even adds a blue whale to his ocean. Suddenly, RED gets it.

"I'M BLUE!"

The sky's the limit, as a whole new world opens up to RED BLUE as everyone sees, really sees, his true color, in Michael Hall's newest hit, Red: A Crayon's Story (HarperCollins, 2015). Preschoolers will have a refresher in color recognition, and older readers will laugh at the clever puns and obtuse color-blindness of all the crayons and perhaps understand the premise of looking beyond social labels to the real person inside. Hall's humorous illustrations of his crayon characters are picture perfect, with grandparents GRAY and SILVER somewhat worn down, and BERRY clearly the sharpest crayon in the box. A not-to-be-missed new classic!

This crayon tale pairs perfectly with last-year's best-seller, Drew Daywalt's The Day the Crayons Quit (Read my colorful review here.)

Michael Hall is also the author of the cleverest Valentine/color/shape book ever, his heart-y hit, My Heart Is Like a Zoo. (See my heartfelt review here.)

Wherever You Look! See a Heart, Share A Heart by Eric Telchin

CATCH A HEART.

KEEP A HEART.

HOLD A HEART.

HIDE A HEART.

Hearts are everywhere--in the shadow of a butterfly's closed wings, in a dapple of sunlight on a wall, in the shape of fallen leaves, in the patch of lichen on a tree's trunk, in the curve of a seashell in the sand.

A wise art teacher once said that learning to do art is really just learning to SEE, and that simple but profound truth is the theme of Eric Techin's heart-themed See a Heart, Share a Heart (Dial Books, 2012). Once Techin saw a heart in a puddle of melted chocolate ice cream, he photographed it, and soon his collection of "found" heart shapes in the world around him began to grow. In this photo essay of hearts, we see accidental hearts everywhere, in the pattern of cracks in asphalt and in concrete, in a coil of discarded wire and a tangled green garden hose, a carelessly dropped ribbon or rubber band, an abandoned shoelace, a brown splotch on a leaf, a scrap of red plastic, the wings of a white moth at rest.

Telchin first uploaded his photographs to boyseeshearts.com, where classrooms of kids also posted their found hearts, and then he assembled his collection into a heartfelt photo essay published just in time for the pre-Valentine's season. It's not a novel idea: there are other found-picture photo books featuring, for example, the letters of the alphabet, and many clever books for the holiday that make creative use of the heart shape (see my review of Michael Hall's ingenious and popular My Heart Is Like a Zoo here.) but Telchin's novel use of selectively "seen" hearts is unique, a special one to add to the repertoire of the heart-y season.

Shaping Up! Friendshape by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld

WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT FRIENDS?

WE'RE GLAD YOU ASKED.

When you first learn about shapes, you start seeing them everywhere. It seems that everything is made out of shapes! And, truth to tell, most everything is.

In their latest, Friendshape (Scholastic Press, 2015), ace creators Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld again combine their language and art skills to show youngsters what wonderful things four little shapes can be and do.

FRIENDS MAKE YOU FEEL WELCOME!

Triangle centers itself on top of square, and voila'! It's a house! and red Rectangle rolls out in front, a red carpet for Circle to use to roll up right to the door!

Friends can make for fun, too! Balance Rectangle at the apex of Triangle, and LOOK! Square and Circle have themselves a seesaw upon which to enjoy the ups and downs of geometry!

And this circle of friendship is not exclusive, as we see when Octagon happens comes into view.

GLAD YOU COULD STOP BY! (Get it? Stop Sign?)

Shapes can disagree, but if they look at the idea from another angle, one can see that the other has got a good point! Friendshapes stick together to make stacks, even though their constructions do have their ups and downs, but they usually get their ideas off the ground, as square on rectangle topped by triangle make a rocket flight to the moon, appropriately played by blue Circle. And with triangle around, they know they always have a friend to lean on. In fact, if they line up just right, the friends can even spell out l o v e! (sort of)!

When author Rosenthal and artist Lichtenheld come together, even their pages are models of collaborative excellence. Rosenthal's easy wordplay and Lichtenheld's witty sight gags make this lesson in primary shapes an adventure for the imagination and an easy lesson on cooperation that will have kids eager to try their hand to see what else they can make with their shape blocks. Perfect as a lap book for a toddler, a preschool class read for a shapes unit, or a funny easy read for emergent readers, this one is a first purchase for home, public, and school libraries.

Pair this one with Michael Hall's Perfect Square and his delightful My Heart Is Like a Zoo, (see my reviews here) and for a look at natural shapes, Judith Nouvion's Shapes (Picture This) (see review here) for a basic geometry lesson which will leave no one bent out of shape!