One Is The Loneliest Number: Stick and Stone by Beth Ferry and Tom Lichtenheld

Stick is lonely.

Stone is solitary.

Stick is the only twig on the beach, blown from his tree, with only one leaf left to remind him of his fellows.

Stone is a solo igneous rock regurgitated from his volcano. All by their lonesome, they both feel like the only pebble on the beach.

A ZERO.

A ONE.

Seesaws are a downer for Stone. It's a one-sided ride. Pinecone jeers when Stone rolls off the swing at the park. But Stick comes to his rescue, and with a word orders Pinecome to beat it.

"GEE, YOU STUCK UP FOR ME!" STONE WHISPERS.

An unlikely union is forged. The new friends set out together to explore, Stone going ahead, flattening a path in the tall grass for Stick to waddle along behind him. They bask together on the sunny beach--until disaster befalls them both.

A hurricane strikes! Stone stays steady, but Stick is picked up by the wind, along with Pinecone, and blown inland, leaving Stone alone, gazing sadly at Stick's lost leaf left on the sand.

Stone sets out to search, day and night, calling for his windblown friend.

STIIIICK!!

At last, his search-and-rescue mission is successful--sort of. He come upon his friend, stuck upside down in the muddle of a monster puddle.

But Stone has one thing on his side--MASS! Smiling, he applies physics and rolls downhill, right into the pond, where his displacement generates enough force to splash Stick right out onto terra firma. Stick is full of superlatives for his weighty friend.

"YOU ROCK, STONE!"

Together Stick and Stone are not just the latest storybook odd couple. Together their one and zero make... a 10, in Beth Ferry's new Stick and Stone (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015). Author Ferry not only tells her tale in a text that new readers can navigate with ease, but also with fine rhymes and a few choice puns to tickle the funnybones of youngsters lucky enough to discover this one. Not only does she show friends in need indeed, but offers a bit of comeuppance for her lightweight but eventually repentant bully, Pinecone. All ends well, thanks also to the mighty skills of Tom Lichtenheld (illustrator of the perennial best-seller, Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site,) who imparts plenty of personality with two dots and a mouth line for his protagonists. It's friends to THE END of this book, or... maybe not, if youngsters refuse to let Stick and Stone get by without a sequel.

The Magic Trumpet: A Good Night for Ghosts (Magic Tree House #42) by Mary Pope Osborne

"You are trapped here now. Trapped forever!" said the ghost of Jean LaFitte.

"Play, Annie, play!" said Jack.

"I can't!" said Annie. "We used up all the magic! It's just an ordinary trumpet now!"

"Here, give it to me," said Dipper.

Dipper put the trumpet to his lips. He drew a deep breath and then he blew.

And the rest is history. Or in the hands of Mary Pope Osborne, historical fantasy. In this second Merlin Mission adventure, Magic Tree House #42: A Good Night for Ghosts (A Stepping Stone Book(TM)) (Random House, 2009) Jack and Annie travel to the New Orleans of 1915 with the urgent mission of persuading the young Louis Armstrong to return to his first love, New Orleans jazz. Louie, then nicknamed "Dipper" for his favorite tune, "Dippermouth Blues," has just returned from two years at the Waifs' Home, where he was sent for a youthful misadventure. Now fourteen, Louie has "The Money Blues" and is determined to stay out of trouble with the local street musicians, work hard at his three jobs, and help support his family. Although Jack and Annie spend a day following him around and urging him to play his horn with his old street band, Louie is adamant that he has put all that behind him.

As in their previous book, Magic Tree House #41: Moonlight on the Magic Flute (A Stepping Stone Book(TM)), in which their magic flute restores the love of music to the young Mozart, Jack and Annie's mission is to help Louis Armstrong also turn his genius to providing happiness to the world. Equipped with Merlin's magic flute, now transformed into a magic trumpet, and a research guide, A History of New Orleans Music, the two shadow Louis, helping him deliver coal, wash dishes at The Greasy Spoon, and unload bananas down at the docks, as they try to persuade him to pick up his cornet and make some music. Dipper calls them a couple of "potato heads" for working for nothing, but as they drive the coal wagon through the French Quarter, he treats them to a bit of scat singing ("Skid dat de dat") as he points out that there's music in everything he hears.

But Jack and Annie stick to their mission, and when all else fails, they pull out their History of New Orleans Music and show Louie his future biography. And when he proves that his trumpet can make even Jean LaFitte's ghost dance on All Saints' Eve, he resolutely sets off to fetch his cornet and heads for a riverboat gig with his old band that night, and as Jack and Annie's tree house rises over the city, the sound of that unforgettable cornet is heard from the river--and American music is changed forever.

In her prologue to this book, Mary Pope Osborne recalls a seminal few weeks in New Orleans:

I always knew it was only a matter of time before Jack and Annie and I would have an adventure in New Orleans with Louis Armstrong, and now I can say it was one of the best adventures I ever had.

Osborne evokes the sights, smells, and social scene, good and bad, of early twentieth century New Orleans, titling each of her chapters after an Armstrong recording--"Way Down Yonder in New Orleans," "Potato Head Blues," "Heebie Jeebies"--and sets the climax of the story in the old blacksmith shop said to be haunted by pirate LaFitte and his crew where the three youngsters take shelter from a twilight storm. There is plenty of atmosphere and historic detail folded skillfully into the latest in the series, and, as always, Sal Murdocca's black and white pencil illustrations give form to the text perfectly. A companion book, Magic Tree House Research Guide #20: Ghosts: A Nonfiction Companion to A Good Night for Ghosts (A Stepping Stone Book(TM)), provides classroom resources just right for the upcoming spooky season. Together with its predecessor, Magic Tree House #41: Moonlight on the Magic Flute (A Stepping Stone Book(TM)), these two books also provide great tie-ins for an across-the-curriculum music study. Somehow I think that Mozart and Armstrong have a lot in common. Just imagine what their ghosts might have to say to each other about the joys of making music! (How about October biography book reports with readers dressing as the ghosts of their subjects, sharing their life experiences with each other?)

Fans can take a look at a intriguing trailer which provides a visit with Mary Pope Osborne as she talks about research, writing (and re-writing) here.

Picture That! The First Drawing by Mordicai Gerson

Some of the oldest drawings ever found were made more than 30,000 years ago in a cave in southern France.

In that same cave there was a footprint of an eight-year-old child.

The juxtaposition of that child's footprint and that paleolithic drawing is the jumping-off point for Mordicai Gerstein's elegant picture book which imagines that first human artist picking up a burnt stick from the edge of the fire and creating the first human art.

But before there is art, there must be an artist, someone who could see what is real in his mind and imagine reproducing it as a painting, and  in Gerstein's telling of it, he is a young boy who loves to watch animals, with his wolf dog at his heels,  looking at a distant woolly mammoth and seeing the shape of that beast in the changing clouds above him.

No one else "sees" what he sees in the clouds and in the shapes of the rocks around him.

"Papa! That cloud looks like a woolly mammoth!"

"It looks like a cloud to me," says his father. "Like a cloud."

"Why can't they see what I see?" the boy wonders.

At night the shadows of the dancing flames from the fire circle looks like running horses to the boy, but although no one else sees  the galloping herd, the boy picks up a charcoal stick and following the curves of the rocky wall, begins to sketch out the shape of one, and then many running horses. The family look at each other and chuckle at the play of this curious child, but then, as he fills in his drawing with a husky, tusky mammoth, someone sees something familiar there.  It is a mammoth.

"This.... is magic!"

"No, Papa. I'm just showing you...."

Caldecott Medalist Mordecai Gerstein (for The Man Who Walked Between the Towers) captures that moment in time which someone, perhaps a child, made the enormous intellectual leap from something visualized in the mind to a concrete, created thing that others can see  and someone can use.  All human creation comes from a personal mental image that is reproduced in the material world, from a carefully shaped spear point to the internet, and Gerstein uses his immense artistic talent as a visual storyteller to take the young reader along to witness such an event.  Using parallel characters, a modern boy with his dog trailing behind and his drawing pencils in his back pocket and the cave boy with his shaggy wolf-pup and his burnt stick, Gerstein takes the modern reader back into a distant historic time, but the same place in the modern mind from which a child artist takes up a crayon to draw a car or an airplane.

"And it's still MAGIC!" says the author.

Gerstein's  latest, The First Drawing (Little, Brown, 2013), displays the artist's skill with word and art, his fine draftsmanship and his skillful use of media, blackline and acrylics, to give a feeling of movement, light and shadows, to the dusky depths of the cave and its walls which provide a canvass for the beginnings of art itself. "Artists see the world differently, but Gerstein suggests their true gift lies in allowing others to share in their visions," says Publishers Weekly. "Solid storytelling, satisfying narrative circularity, and masterful, creative illustrations make this an inspiring story for young artists," adds Kirkus Reviews, and Children's Literature calls it , "another must buy for real library and pre-school and lower grades use."

Gerstein's illustrated author's note provides more of the story of the discovery of  stone age cave art  in those caves of France, making this book a good one to pair with another Caldecott winner's, Emily Arnold McCully's The Secret Cave: Discovering Lascaux.

On the Beach: Water Sings Blue: Ocean Poems by Kate Coombs

TIDELINES

OCEAN DRAWS ON THE SAND.
WITH TRINKETS OF SHELL AND STONE.
THE WAY I WRITE ON THE SIDEWALK,
WITH A STICK OF CHALK AT HOME.

SEA SIGNS HER NAME IN LETTERS
LONG AND WAVY AND CLEAR.
SAYING, "DON'T FORGET ME--
---I WAS HERE...
WASSS HERE,
WASSSSSS HERE."

Inexorably drawn to the sea as we are, humans have a fascination with its edge, where land ends and the ocean begins. What we find and see there has a mystery, a glimpse of life in another world, one where water is the breath of life and the source of everything. From its sandy-beach-with-footprints endpapers to the last sigh of the retreating tide, poet Kate Coombs latest, Water Sings Blue (Chronicle Books, 2012), is like a day at the beach, leaving the dark town "with its closed brown shutters and doors" to take a boat down the bay to shore, where seagulls soar and Frank the Hermit Crab sets up his real estate office--with everything from a modest periwinkle cabin to a kingly conch shell for the wealthy beachgoer--and the beachcomer can shop in a tidal pool ("They carry everything there... mussels by the bushels..."). There are lyrical metaphoric lines, evoking Shelley, such as these from "Sand's Story."

WE USED TO BE ROCKS.
WE USED TO BE STONES.
WE STOOD PROUD AS CASTLES,
ALTARS AND THRONES.

NOW WE GRIND AND GRUMBLE,
HUDDLED AND GRAVE,
AT THE TOUCH OF OUR BREAKER
AND MAKER, THE WAVE.

Coombs' metaphors can be comic, as she compares seagulls to beagles ("All they think about is food!"), until they are transformed instantly when they leap into the air:

... WHEN SEAGULLS TAKE WING,
THEY BECOME A NEW THING.
ATTAINING SOME DIGNITY.

BUT BEAGLES ARE ROUND
AND REMAIN ON THE GROUND,
PRETTY MUCH DIGNITY FREE.

Water Sings Blue lets the readers soar with the seagulls, swim for their lives from the shark and cringe from the "black hole" of the oarfish's maw, undulate and trail with the jellyfish, shine and splash with seafoam, and lease a summer place from Frank the Hermit Crab, in a wonderful collection of lovely and lyrical, humorous and ironic, and downright captivating poems in many styles, haiku to couplets, free verse to classic form. This new book is as refreshing as a sea breeze and as heart-touching as an "ILY" written in the sand. Perhaps the best poetry book for children of all ages of this season, finely and fittingly illustrated by the talented Meilo So.

As the Wall Street Journal reviewer says, "A feeling of sweet delicacy pervades the pages," and Publishers Weekly adds, "Coombs punctuates her sweeping, lullaby-like poems about the ocean with surprising personification and unexpected imagery."

I say, get this book and read it to anyone who will listen, really listen to it. Like holding a conch shell to the ear, it is the sound of the sea.

Group Soup! Thukpa for All by Praba Ram & Sheela Preuitt

GONGGGGG!

Tseering perks up and heads for home. Tikk Tiukkk... Tseering treks with his stick, sweeping it left and right.

Abi's noodle soup beckons. Hearty, chunky thukpa. Yummy, spicy thukpa.

His friend Rigzin calls hello and asks what is his hurry, and Tseering tells him his grandmother is making her special soup, the best in the village.

Would you like to join us? Tseering asks.

Who could resist? Apparently no one, because as Tseering's feet follow the pebbled path, first his uncle Tashi, whose lost lamb Tseering has returned, then Aunty, and then old Norboo, feeling poorly, happily accept his offer to share Abi's soup.

But back home, Tseering's recital of unexpected guests throws Abi into a tizzy:

"All of them! My dear boy! We need more water... hmmm...vegetables and noodles, too. Let me see what I can do!" Abi says, bustling around.

Tseering hurries to the pea patch to find some pods with peas, shells them out, and returns to the house, just in time to greet Rigzin arriving with cheese and some water. Neema Aunty brings apricot jam and freshly kneaded dough for noodles, Uncle brings buttered tea, and old Norboo brings spinach for the soup. Abi busies herself chopping onions and tomatoes and browning them up in her big soup pot when...the power goes out!

How can Abi finish preparing the soup in the dark?

"Lights on or off don't matter to me!" says Tseering. "I'll help you."

Tseering sniffs out just the right spices to season the vegetables and rolls out Aunty's dough for the noodles for the soup, and soon....

Abi's noodle soup is served.

And in Praba Ram and Sheela Preuitt's hearty and warm story, Thukpa for All (Consortium Books, 2018), everyone shares in the making and the eating of Abi's hot, spicy soup. With the colorful local illustrations of Shilpa Ranade, this story of cooperation and generosity is as warm as a big bowl of hearty, chunky thukpa. Just as in the European folk tale, Stone Soup, in this Asian version from the high mountains of India, all the unexpected guests bring along a little something for the dinner pot, a celebration of community that results in a plenitude of a unique potluck dinner. "An appealing introduction to a part of the world that’s underrepresented in picture books," adds School Library Journal."

Ancient Ardor! Cave Boy Crush by Beth Ferry

Neander is a typical lad from back in the Paleolithic.

He is fond of of drawing on his cave's walls. He likes catching fish in the lake.

And he loves his pet rock, Rock.

Or he thought he did--until he caught sight of the girl of his dreams.

She was short.

She was hairy.

She was perfect.

He couldn't stop thinking about Neanne.

Neander doesn't know what to call this powerful feeling that has him all moonstruck and mopey. What is This Thing Called Love? would have been his theme song, except that music hadn't been invented yet.

But Papa and Mama notice Neander's mooney mood.

"You remember?" said Mama.

"Oh!" said Papa. "Crush."

Now Neander knows what this powerful feeling is called, but he doesn't know what to do about it. He picks Neanne a bunch of flowers and crushes them with his club. Neanne thinks he's scary and runs away. Neander finds a beautiful big conch shell and brings it back to her house. He blows a big note and crushes it with a big blow. Affrighted, Neanne flees.  Will this prehistoric Charlie Brown ever win the favor of this little red-haired girl?

Finally Neander chips out an iceberg image of his love, which she reduces to ice cubes! COOL! Now we're talkin'!

Young love can be a crushing experience in Beth Ferry's funny story of archaic infatuation, Caveboy Crush (Abrams Books, 2019). Artist Joseph Kuefler's cute little cave kids show how awkward crushes can be even back in primitive times. Ferry's heartwarming Ice Age love story is a different sort of read for Valentine's Day.

For more heart-y reading, share this one with Beth Ferry's Sealed with a Kiss and Stick and Stone (see review here).

Come Fly With Me! Gretchen Over the Beach by R. W. Alley

ONE BEACH DAY, GRETCHEN'S BROTHERS AND SISTER RUSHED DOWN TO THE WATER.

GRETCHEN CRIED, "WAIT UP!"

BUT NO ONE LISTENED.

Annabelle, Clark, and Mitchell shuck their shirts and with flippers, surf board, and dinosaur floatie, they hit the surf.

Little Gretchen trails behind, burdened by her flip-flops, beach towel, and a sand bucket with a busted handle that dumps her four roly-polys into the sand. No one listens to her plea for help her taking her roly-polys down to the water.

Well, phooey on them! Gretchen plops down by a tidal pool and starts to mold a sand castle when something amazing happens!

GRETCHEN'S SPORTY NEW HAT WITH THE FANCY RIBBON FLEW AWAY WITH THE BREEZE.

But Gretchen manages to grab the trailing ribbon and her roly-polys follow suit. Scrambling inside the hat, they float higher and higher. Gretchen orders the breeze to lift them to the clouds.

Gretchen goes for a dip in the wispy clouds until she drifts to a small island cloud. But alas, the hat with the four roly-polys sails on and on into a cloud, the ribbon still wafting behind. Thinking fast, Gretchen hails a passing seagull and surfs on his back toward her missing hat,  using it as a parachute to float her and the rolys safely down to the scene of her sand castle, just as her siblings stagger out of the surf to the umbrella where dad is unpacking snacks. Oblivious of her airborne adventures, big brother Clark chastises her for losing her fancy ribbon from the hat.

SHE WASN'T EVEN WORRIED ABOUT HER RIBBON.

And why should she be, when overhead there's a helpful seagull doing a flyover to return the ribbon, in R. W. Alley's Gretchen Over the Beach (Houghton Mifflin Clarion, 2016). Big brothers and sisters sometimes leave their youngest sibling behind, but the resourceful Gretchen has the best adventure of all in this sunny story of the power of fanciful thinking.

Part of a set of four forthcoming seaside stories, this one stars a resilient little heroine who imagines a way to catch a wave without hitting the water. Alley's artwork is altogether endearing, with ink-and-watercolor illustrations in watery pastel palette, set clearly somewhere on the northeastern coast, as evidenced by the weathered pink frame beach house, stone walls, and fir trees in the landscape fronting the yellow-brown sands. Only the faces and stick arms and legs of the roly-polys reveal that Gretchen has a mind of her own, a girl for whom a day at the beach has a little something extra.