There. We feel better. Now for the good stuff.
The preachiest book to make our cut is King Midas and the Golden Touch(Morrow. $16), but Charlotte Craft’s simple, elegant retelling doesn’t actually spell out a moral and K. Y. Craft’s pictures make gold look both butterily seductive and brazenly horrific. My Man Blue(Dial. $15.99), with pictures by Jerome Lagarrigue, sneaks in a bit of wisdom (it’s OK for African-American boys to cook and read), but mostly it’s the story of a kid and his mother’s boyfriend warming to each other.
Young kids can learn from Geraldine McCaughrean’s Grandma Chickenlegs(Carolrhoda. $15.95) that if you’re nice to a wicked witch’s cat and dog, they’ll help you out of a jam. And while kindergartners and first graders won’t learn much from David Shannon’s David Goes to School(Blue Sky. $14.95), they’ll rejoice when the pumpkin-headed, spiky-haired hero, always in trouble with the teacher, finally gets a gold star. And better still, he gets to go home.
The rest of our choices merely nourish the imagina–oh, shut up. See what reading this stuff does to you? The rest are just for fun.
J.otto Seibold and V. L. Walsh’s go-to-sleep book Penguin Dreams(Chronicle. $13.95) is an absolutely weird inner voyage by a penguin named Chongo Chingi: a sort of “FinnegansWake” for the preschool set. Peter McCarty’s Little Bunny on the Move(Henry Holt. $14.95) is more conventionally dreamy: a tiny white rabbit makes his way home through a misty landscape glowing with gently eerie light. And the quintessential dream story, Jack and the Beanstalk, is retold at least twice this year: by Richard Walker (Barefoot. $15.95), with Niamh Sharkey’s Miro-like pictures, and by Ann Keay Beneduce (Philomel. $15.99), with pictures by Gennady Spirin in a more traditional style you could call cartoon Flemish. And finally, a pair of nontraditional books that owe their existence to computer technology–and show (if anybody still wondered) that it hasn’t killed off the imagination. David Kirk’s Nova’s Ark(Scholastic. $17.95), about a young space robot searching for and rescuing his father, tells its story in eye-popping 3-D digitized images. We can also thank digital imaging for the glossy, spookily lovely processed photos in Suza Scalora’s The Fairies(Joanna Cotler. $19.95), purporting to be the record of a scholarly expedition to document and catalog fairies. Adults will recognize her creatures as models, but kids will see a visionary world of sadness and cruelty, beauty and grace. Unless, of course, they’ve been edified beyond wonderment. In which case, they’ll still find plenty to read: values, virtues, all that good stuff. Every book has something to offer. How do you think every book in this article rated? Let’s discuss.
