Chih-Yuan Chen

Gecko Press

9780958278706

May 2010

Still in his mid-thirties, Taiwanese picture book artist, Chih-Yuan Chen has produced several notable titles, including this amusing tale of a baby crocodile brought up imagining he is a duck. Chen’s artwork is marvelously loose and free-flowing, and the book has been extremely well produced (on thick paper with buff page backgrounds) by Gecko Press , a New Zealand publishing house that prides itself on translating and publishing award-winning, “curiously good” children’s books from around the world. Guji-Guji was first published in Taiwan in 2003 and then in this edition in New Zealand in 2006. I don’t remember seeing it till now, so I am guessing this is its first UK distribution. On their website, Gecko Press claim to “choose books strong in story, illustration and design, with a big ‘heart factor’.” They certainly did that in this case.

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Elsa Beskow

Floris

978086315771

September 2010

This is one of a large selection of titles by Swedish author-illustrator, Elsa Beskow, made available in English translation by Floris Books. According to the publishing details page this title has not been previously available in English. It was first published in 1923 as Resan Till Landet Langesen. The name of the translator is for some reason not given.
At first sight Beskow’s artwork may come across as somewhat naive and dated, but it is undeniably charming and very simply accessible, as is the story.
Two children are playing imaginatively on a dead tree trunk. They use a broken umbrella as dragon wings. While they are riding the pretend dragon a mischievous gnome makes it real, and away they actually fly.
Floris Books certainly champion this author, calling her ‘the Beatrix Potter of Scandinavia’. They even publish an Elsa Beskow calendar.
If you haven’t heard of Beskow before, visit this website: http://kampanj.bonniercarlsen.se/beskow/meny1.htm

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Oliver Jeffers

HarperCollins

9780007182305

March 2010

Top marks to HarperCollins for the way they have designed and produced this fine work of art (guided by the artist himself, no doubt). Jeffers is exactly that, an artist who works in many formats, picture books being just one of them. A visit to his website – www.oliverjeffers.com – is recommended.
As for this particular title, I believe I love every single thing about it, from the shade of yellow on the book jacket, to the hand-written author/illustrator name, to the charming opening endpaper drawings, to the opening spread with its high horizon, wide treetrunked landscape with thinly growing flowers, a man with a walking-stick looking on as a young girl bends inquisitively towards the flower in the foreground… all the way though to the final endpapers and their biology-lesson-style drawings of a human heart.
This is an impressively moving story about the loss of childhood wonder and its eventual rediscovery. We see the girl, never named, taking delight in all she encounters, until one day she comes upon an emblematically empty chair. Suddenly her whole world becomes empty and heartless. She shuts her heart away in a bottle, lives safely but unfeelingly in a humdrum world.
I like particularly the two pages that Jeffers creates to show us how hard it is for the girl to get her heart back. She is shown at a workshop table, all possible tools at hand, but none of them will smash the bottle and free the heart. She is shown atop a high brick wall, dropping the bottle from a great height, but it just bounces.
It takes another girl, as alive and full of wonder as she once was, to help her free the heart and put it back where it belongs. She ends the book sitting in the high-backed emblematic chair, reading, a pile of books at her side, and a big thought cloud rising above her, teeming with a splatter of differing images.
This is a very fine book, ready to be enjoyed on many different levels, by many diferent ages.

Sarah Dyer

Frances Lincoln

9781847800695

February 2010

Wonderfully amusing illustrations in this join-dad-at-work-day story. Rush hour has everyone skating to work in a double-page-spread that will have children lingering over each of the different scooters. The ‘morning meeting’ spread is fun too, with dad’s arm around Monster and the table festooned with an assortment of memos, coffee cups and plates of biscuits and cakes. To be frank, not a lot happens during the rest of the day, so the trick to enjoying this picture book will be in savouring the pictures and improvising the telling. The ending teeters on a working-dad housewife-mum stereotype, perhaps not sufficiently compensated for by the irony of the final words, accompanying the picture of mum, broom in one arm, hoover in the other: “Who has it easy too.”

Joanna Walsh & Judi Abbott

Simon & Schuster

9781847384362

January 2010

Joanna Walsh’s verse text and Judi Abbot’s [Giuditta Gaviraghi’s) illustrations combine very satisfyingly in a book that will appeal to both very young children and, I suspect, smoochily sentimental adults looking for a Valentine gift that doesn’t cost much more than a card.

Caryl Hart

Orchard Books

9781408304976

October 2009

When I first picked up this picture book and flipped through its pages I was ready to dismiss it as a blatant Lauren Child ripoff, but then I realised the illustrator is Leigh Hodgkinson, creative director of the first Charlie and Lola animation and the stylistic presentation of Caryl Hart’s rhyming story about table manners made sense.
I like Hodgkinson’s ‘Colin’ titles, but here the ambivalent storyline strikes a rather strange note with Hart’s verse being neither funny nor rhythmically assured enough to carry conviction.
Worth looking out for if you want a picture book about table manners.

Mick Inkpen

Hodder

9780340989623

September 2009

The Snapdragon does something very impish and rude at the beginning of this picture book. He swoops down, bites off the ‘k’ from the word book, and then takes away the lower part of the letter ‘B’, leaving behind the word ‘Poo’.
I can’t wait to read this picture book to a group of 5/6 year olds, but I know just as surely as Mick Inkpen obviously does that that opening is going to have them squealing with glee.
They won’t laugh quite as loudly on any other page in the but the story of how Bookmouse manages to retrieve the missing parts of the word ‘Book’ is entertaining enough, and Snapdragon as illustrated by Inkpen is a very endearing rogue.

Mij Kelly and Ross Collina

Hodder

9780340959992

September 2009

A very pleasingly designed and presented picture book to read aloud to pre-school children. Ross Collins’ large full-coloured double-spread illustrations are really easy for young children to ‘read’ as they listen to Mij Kelly rhyming words being read to them.
A book about using the imagination “to make me go ‘WOW’ “.
I love the end papers, with rows of red silhouetted imaginary creatures.

James MAyhew

Scholastic

9781846169267

September 2009

The Cinderella story as revealed in a musical reverie…
Ella Bella has gone to her ballet lesson with only one ballet shoe. The teacher lends her a pair from a trunk filled with beautiful old shoes. “You remind me of Cinderella,” says the dancing instructor. “She also lost a shoe.”
The children dance to a musical box. While the rest of the class go and get changed Ella starts the musical box again and imagines herself into the Cinderella story, where all the familiar elements are mostly present, except for the glass slippers, which here are replaced by silver dancing shoes that Ella finds in the trunk.
Mayhew’s illustrations are, as always, beautifully fluent.
The final page explains that in Prokofiev’s ballet of Cinderalla there is also no glass slipper, but instead a pair of dancing shoes.
This picture book would make a delightful present for any young girl just beginning to take an interest in dance and music.