All the World by Liz Garton Scanlon

An artist must have a distinctive, memorable style for my seven-year-old to recognize the similarities between illustrations in different books.

“Dad, can we read All the World?”

“Sure, Bud. Climb aboard.”

So up on my lap he hops, we crack open the book, and he says, “Is this by the same person who did A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever?” (At the same time I was thinking, “That little girl on the front could be Clementine at age five if she had red hair.”)

So congratulations to Marla Frazee. Seven-year-olds in Wisconsin recognize your distinctive style, and their parents appreciate how it so engages their seven-year-olds.

But let’s not give short shrift to Liz Garton Scanlon’s text. All the World, written in verse, shows the smallest parts of our world and our selves and slowly moves outward to reveal how each of us and each of the small parts around us fit into the world as a whole.

“Rock, stone, pebble, sand …” starts the first page showing two siblings on the beach.
“Body, shoulder arm, hand …” continues page two, showing how the siblings interact with the beach.
“A moat to dig, a shell to keep …” is read as the perspective moves to see Mom, Dad, and the truck waiting to take them home.
“All the world is wide and deep.” So finishes the first rhyme.

In the final illustration of the first rhyme, readers can now see the ocean, the shore, others on the beach, the family truck whisking the family down a dusty road toward the village in the distance. From two kids and a bucket of rocks to the entire ocean, All the World shows how all the small parts make up the whole.

Neighbors in a garden change to an entire vegetable market. One child hanging on a branch becomes a family picnic under a tree. “Table, bowl, cup, spoon” becomes a warm, crowded restaurant on a cool night.

But in the end, the pattern changes. All the World moves from the big picture back toward each individual. The book concludes with

“Hope and peace and love and trust
All the world is all of us.”

The Lion and the Mouse by Jerry Pinkney

I generally don’t follow all the pre-Caldecott buzz, but apparently there has never been less suspense than in January of 2010, when everyone and their mother’s librarian expected Jerry Pinkney to take home the medal for The Lion and the Mouse. The Caldecott Medal is awarded for a book’s illustrations. In fact, in the official Caldecott Terms and Criteria, the word author only appears once. Artist appears eight times.

And from first glance onward, it is easily apparent that Jerry Pinkney is an artist by anyone’s definition.

Readers will be able to move through the book quickly, but The Lion and the Mouse begs for an immediate reread. Right from the title page, where the mouse finds himself in paw prints larger than he is, readers will study the remarkable illustrations that reveal more details with each look.

Nearly wordless, the pictures are left to tell the story. Most readers will be familiar with the story already, and my guess is that children who encounter the story for the first time via this book will have an adult leading them through it.

But I wonder if a familiarity with the story is necessary for kids to understand the book independently. For example, kids will see the mouse climb on the lion and see that the lion has captured the Mouse, but why is the lion so mad, and why does he suddenly let the mouse go? More importantly, is it even necessary to know the mouse woke the lion up from a nap? Is the conversation about how someone so small could never help someone so big needed? Do readers need to hear the mouse plead his case?

Maybe the fact that the lion lets the mouse go is reason enough for the Mouse to free the Lion from the hunter’s trap. Maybe a simplified story – lion frees mouse, mouse repays debt – works just as well as the one with a moral about friendship.

Red Sings from Treetops by Joyce Sidman

I am a big fan of This Is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness, the first collaboration between author Joyce Sidman and Pamela Zagarenski, so I was eager to get read Red Sings From Treetops: A Year in Poems, their latest and 2010 Caldecott Honor book. Both books have similar illustrations – part painting and part collage – and I willingly admit, it’s personally a bit frustrating that my favorite of the two isn’t the one with the medal on the cover.

Adding to the illustrations in Red Sings from Treetops are the changes in text. The book starts in spring and progresses through the seasons highlighting the colors of each. Each color word is bold and printed in its own color. Some are highlighted to set them off from backgrounds of the same color.

Spring features red singing from treetops, the white of hail and lightning, and green everywhere. The yellow of the summer sun melt everything and numerous variations of blue describe water. Black describes summer nights. Brown takes over for tired green in fall when orange also arrives. Black and white take center stage in winter, but speckles of red, blue, and even green all make appearances to those who look hard enough. Teachers could certainly use Red Sings from Treetops when studying the seasons, and art teachers could have a field day looking for colors in all parts of life.

I have a healthy respect for poetry even if it isn't a personal favorite, but recommending Red Sings from Treetops is easy despite my literary preferences. The illustrations are deserving, and the text is a colorful walk through the year, especially for people who live in areas where all four seasons firmly stake claim to their own portion of the year.