All age comic books, Kidlit, mglit, movies, entertainment and parenting
Category: Books
These are books that kids will want to read-or should read, but will enjoy doing so. Board book, picture books, kid lit, elementary school books, middle school books, high school books, all age comic books and more will be talked about here.
If Kitten Lady’s Big Book of Little Kittens came with an audio soundtrack it would be the sound of elementary aged children laughing, oohing, squealing and ahhing. Then there’d be nothing, because they’d be too occupied with reading the book. This book knows its purpose, is squarely dedicated to that one segment and hits the nail on the head. Hannah Shaw is the founder of the 501c3 Orphan Kitten Club, has appeared on Animal Planet and provides rescue and adoption services to orphaned kittens in San Diego. This is a book that takes an honest, kid-friendly look at fostering kittens.
If pre-K through early elementary school kids had coffee
tables then If I Was The Sunshine is one of those books that would be front and
center. “Oh, isn’t that book fabulous”, the clumsy kid from down the street
would say. “And those illustrations, the farm animals that were drawn by Loren
Long are absolutely dreamy. They’re solid, yet ethereal and remind me of a
place that I’ve never been to-but I sure want to go”, said the visiting art
critic from some big city on the coast. “The size of the book is great too.
It’s as big around as that dwarf white pumpkin we’re grew last year”, Sam the
farmer from Georgia commented.
In this imaginary world of coffee talk all of these small children would be correct. If I Was The Sunshine is a children’s illustrated book whose mere presence makes you take notice. Boom, all one has to do is look at the book and it grabs your attention. This is a large book at over a square foot large this book takes up a lot of real estate on your shelf. Its height rivals those tall, encyclopedia-style National Geographic books. The size grabs your attention, the art keeps you engaged and the soft, rhyming narration will mellow out crabby children at the end of the day.
Books that capture the attention of elementary or middle school readers need to be entertaining. It’s a bonus if said books can fun and leave those young readers with a smile on their face or a sense of wonder. Rare is the book that can be entertaining and fun, all the while doing it in a non-fiction book that upper elementary aged readers will enjoy. First Names is a line of books from Abrams Books for Young Readers and if this first book is any indication of their things to come it’ll be a go-to series for this age group. First Names: Harry Houdini by Kjartan Poskitt with illustrations by Geraint Ford is a book that has you smiling from couple pages into the book and weaves a breathlessly true tale that you don’t know.
Sophie Johnson loves unicorns. In way she’s like any dreamy-eyed kid between four and eight who wants to believe in magical things. For a short period of our lives trolls, elves and unicorns populate our world. For some people it’s a combination of these creatures, while others are fully invested in one of them. Sophie Johnson, Unicorn Expert is what her business card would say, if six year-olds started carrying them around. What makes this book work is that it goes beyond the imagination of a young child, has fabulous colors and has just a touch of meta to make any kid in that age range enjoy it.
A worry is not a physical thing. The moment you stop obsessing over said ‘worry’ it magically disappears into the background of life. It’s natural to have illustrated books about being worried because some miss and some hit. Ruby Finds a Worry is by Tom Percival and expertly brings his warmth, pacing, sublime story telling ability and art to a worthy book about a topic that we need to address…but not be worried about.
Eight pages should not be this entertaining and be able to tell a contained story. That’s what I was thinking at the end of each profile in Awesome Achievers in Technology, Super and Strange Facts about 12 Almost Famous History Makers. Awesome Achieves is a new book series written by Alan Katz, who wrote the very funny book The Day The Mustache Took Over, its sequel and many others. This is an educational book, but it’s also fun to read and provides dozens of ‘light bulb’ moments when readers will see the moment that something special in history was created.
Wordless books are awesome. They allow readers to use their imagination to entirely propel the story forward. We don’t know anything about their character’s background or the people who are in the story. There are no names and it gives kids, provided they want to play along, a chance for them to tell their own story within the picture narrative that the author has established. Spencer’s New Pet is by Jessie Sima and has a couple neat hooks that will capture young readers.
Being worried is a challenging state of being for kids to process. We want them to be concerned and to be cautious, but worrying about anything and everything is counter-productive. I’m Worried by Michael Ian Black with illustrations by Debbie Ridpath Ohi tackles the concept of worrying in a way that some kids will understand.
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