Tag Archives: Julia Donaldson

Ruby reads 20: Lockdown?

Posted on 13 May 2020 | 9 comments

In the mainstream narrative grandparents everywhere are pining for their socially distanced grandchildren. The Emerging Artist and I have meanwhile been quietly sailing against the current, with more contact than ever, pending our little one being rid of flu-like symptoms. She comes to our place three days a week, and our small collection of children’s books has been much called on. When Gleebooks at Dulwich Hill reopened recently, we fell on its non-virtual shelves with cries of joy and came away with arms full.

Here are some of the old and some of the new.

Libby Gleeson (writer) and Jedda Robaard (Illustrator), Soon (Little Hare 2020)

This is brand new and has already been requested/demanded many times. It may be a mistake to give a toddler who is obsessed with babies a book about waiting for a new baby to be born, but if so it’s a mistake that’s hard to resist. We wait, wait, wait. We clean, clean, clean. We paint, paint, paint. And just about all the mother mouse has to say on the subject is, ‘Soon.’ You don’t need me to tell you the ending, but I will say that it is emotionally very satisfying. Libby Gleeson’s incantatory text and Jedda Robaard’s calm, charged images make this a joy to read together. (The birth itself, like the devouring of the apple in Grug and the Big Red Apple, happens offstage.)

Ian Falconer, Olivia (Simon & Schuster 2000)

Olivia is a great artist and dancer trapped in the body of an anthropomorphised pig and the persona of a six year old girl. The back-cover praise from dame Joan Sutherland, Mikhail Baryshnikov and David Hockney, at least one of them written posthumously, are just one of the delights for adult readers. A 2 and a half year old seems to be delighted as well. Olivia argues, paints, dances, fusses about her clothes (which I’m glad to report are all bright red, no pink in sight), and is generally fabulous on pages with acres of white space.

Julia Donaldson (writer) and David Roberts (illustrator), Jack and the Flumflum Tree (Macmillan Children’s Books 2011)

We may have gleaned this from a street library a while back. In it the enormously prolific Julia Donaldson teams up with illustrator David Roberts for a quest story. Jack’s granny has spots and the only cure is the fruit of the faraway flumflum tree. Jack and friends sail away, face many challenges in which the contents of a patchwork sack come in handy. It bounces along, and ends with a terrible pun. I think Ruby likes it because it’s got sharks in it, and they’re almost as interesting as the big bad wolf or a bear.

Cressida Cowell (writer) and Neal Layton (illustrator), Emily Brown and the Thing (Hodder CHildren’s Books 2007)

Cressida Cowell wrote How to Train Your Dragon, which I haven’t had the pleasure of reading yet. She has also created a whole series of Emily Brown books: in this one, Emily Brown and her old rag rabbit Stanley keep trying to go to sleep but are kept awake by a weird creature, a ‘Thing’, who demands that they perform great feats to help him. They perform the feats – retrieving his cuddly (we say ‘blanky’) from the Dark and Scary Wood, fetching a glass of milk from the Wild and whirling Wastes, and so on. In the end Emily refuses to pander any more, and everyone gets a good sleep. We love this one.

And now a couple more Julia Donaldson titles. Is anyone else finding that her books are multiplying like mice? Nice mice, of course.

Julia Donaldson (writer) and Axel Scheffler (illustrator), The Smartest Giant in Town (Macmillan Children’s Books 2002)

Here Julia Donaldson is teamed up with Axel Scheffler, the co-creator of her most famous book, The Gruffalo.

This is a tale told in prose that allows the reader-aloud to burst into song at the end of each of its episodes. A scruffy giant wanders into town and buys a smart new outfit. Then, in fairytale rhythms, he gives one item of flash clothing after another away to animals in distress. In the end, he retrieves his scruffy old clothes from the garbage outside the clothes shop, and is reconciled to his scruffy status. But them the animals he has helped turn up and celebrate his kindness. This is amiable and charming. The text is beautifully honed, and the illustrations are full of unexpected joys – other giants can be seen among the rooftops and characters from fairytales pass the giant on the road without comment.

Meanwhile, the parents had felt the need for variation and bought a number of books online, among them:

Julia Donaldson (writer) and Axel Scheffler (illustrator), Zog (Scholastic 2016)

Told in the bouncing rhyme that I think of as Julia Donaldson’s typical mode, and which is a lot harder to do than it looks, this one plays sweet variations on the dragon theme. As young Zog learns all the basic dragon skills he is helped out by a girl who happens to turn up just as he gets into trouble. When he has to capture a princess, well, guess who turns out to be one? And when a knight comes to rescue the princess, I don’t think you’ll guess what happens, but it’s a most satisfactory ending with a most satisfactory variation on the tale’s recurring refrain.

Besides the books, there’s the scooter, the dolls, the trampoline, the cooking, the painting, the songs and the athletic challenges – all making worthwhile the weariness come 6 o’clock

Soon is the eight book I’ve read for the 2020 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

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Ruby Reads 18: buckets from the stream

Posted on 2 March 2020 | 4 comments

Blogging about books read to Ruby could become a full time occupation. All I can do is dip my little bucket in the stream every now and then and show you what I caught in it. Here goes!

Christina Booth, Are These Hen’s Eggs? (Allen & Unwin 2020)

Mrs Roberta Kennedy, a retired school teacher, reads to children at Gleebooks in Dulwich Hill every Thursday morning. When we attended last week, the usual contingent from a nearby childcare centre didn’t arrive so Ruby made up half the young audience and this was a wonderfully intimate experience for her, especially as the other little one was sick and not that interested.

Are These Hen’s Eggs? is hot off the press, and though it’s the first book by Christina Booth that I’ve encountered, she has written and illustrated a lot (link to her website here). This one has a story of friendship and cooperation – the hen’s eggs are scattered in a storm and other animals help to retrieve them – and it slips in a sweetly amusing lesson, because as the eggs hatch we get to see a range of creatures that are born out of eggs, culminating in a very cute turtle (I was half expecting a snake, and was relieved that Christina Booth went for cute rather than scary).

Alex Barrow, If I Had a Sleepy Sloth (Thames & Hudson 2020)

Also hot off the press (after all it’s a bookshop and the merchandise must be promoted), this is great fun. I must admit that what I remember is the incidental facts about sloths: moss grows in their fur and they have very long claws. I can’t tell you if these facts were in the text or in Mrs Kennedy’s asides. But the images are splendidly friendly.

Didier Lévy (text) and Fred Benaglia (images), How to Light Your Dragon (Thames & Hudson 2020)

A child tries all sorts of tactics to rekindle his pet dragon’s fire. In the end, it’s his affection that does the trick. We’r never quite sure whether we’re on the child’s side or the dragons. Do we hope the fire will come or do we wish the child would just leave the poor fireless creature alone? Either way, we love the images.

This is translated from French, original title Comment rallumer un dragon éteint. I couldn’t find the translator’s name anywhere, sorry. Didier Lévy is a prolific creator of children’s books, and I hope this isn’t the only one that’s available to Anglophone children. many of them ringing the changes o fairytale themes. Fred Benaglia is similarly prolific in the Francophone world.

Chris McKimmie, I NEED a Parrot (Ford Street Publishing 2019)

Mrs Kennedy showed her virtuosity here. Realising that the books she had selected in advance weren’t appropriate for her audience of a solitary two year old (plus grandparents), she scrimmaged around on the shelves and chose this, and did a brilliant unrehearsed reading. The child narrator here wants a parrot and goes thought a list of the things she doesn’t want – the whale in the cover illustration is the most outlandish, but not by much.

Eunice Moyle and Sabrina Moyle, Super Pooper and Whizz Kid: Potty Power! (Harry N Abrams 2018)

This wasn’t part of Robbie Kennedy’s repertoire. It was in the board book shelf at Marrickville Library, and some inner demon prompted me to pick it up and read it with appropriate gusto to Ruby. It’s a rude and irreverent explanation of the use of a potty with adventurous typography and wealth of synonyms for bodily functions. I don’t know that the synonyms did much for Ruby, but she stayed interested. The bit I liked best was where the child, once sitting on the potty, has to wait … and WAIT …and WAIT.

Julia Donaldson (words) and Axel Scheffler (images), Tabby McTat (Alison Green Books, Tenth Anniversary edition 2019)

This Tabby McTat is a busker’s dear friend. When Tabby is distractd by a beautiful female cat named Sox and the busker gets into serious trouble they are separated. It’s a book about love and loss and change and hope. Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler are one of the power partnerships of current children’s literature, and this is my favourite of their books. Donaldson makes rhyming look easy and her wit is brilliant as well as age-appropriate – Ruby loves the song that Tabby McTat sings with his human busker friend:

Me, you and the old guitar,
How perfectly, perfectly happy we are.
MEEE-EW and the old guitar.
How PURRRR-fectly happy we are!

Or at least, she quotes it when the book is picked up and has told me I can’t do the song: ‘No song, Poppa!’ I must be doing it differently from her father, who is a very good reader of children’s books.

Are These Hen’s Eggs? is the fourth book I’ve read for the 2020 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

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Ruby Reads (16): Other books by …

Posted on 4 October 2019 | 13 comments

There are many joys in being a grandfather. The discovery of new books for the very young is one of them. Here are some recent ones.

Bill Martin Jr & Eric Carle, Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What Do You See? (Henry Holt & Co 2006)

This was read to us by the marvellous Lisa during Rhyme Time at Leichhardt Library. It’s a sequel to Bill Martin Jr and Eric Carle’s Brown Bear, Brown Bear what Do You See?, or really a variation on it. This one isn’t an accumulation of creatures seen as in the original (and as in Mem Fox and Julie Vivas’s I went walking), but a chain, each seen creature becoming the seer in the next spread. These books make magic from extremely simple text and totally beguiling images.

Julia Donaldson & Axel Scheffler, Room on the Broom (Pan Macmillan 2016)

Julia Donaldson, especially when teamed up with illustrator Axel Scheffler, has been one of the revelations brought to me by grandfatherhood. This is a simple story of a witch who loses parts of her equipment and each time she regains one she takes on an extra passenger as well. It’s genial and bounces along with wonderful rhymes.

Keith Faulkner (words) and Jonathan Lambert (images), The Wide-Mouthed Frog (Madcap 1997)

I first heard this story as a joke. The wide mouthed frog wanders through his environment asking other animals what they eat. When you tell it as a joke, each time you speak one of the frog’s lines you stretch your mouth wide with two fingers. When he meets the crocodile, who says he eats wide-mouthed frogs, you purse your lips and say, ‘Ooooh.’ It works well as a picture book, too, though the punch line needs to expand: ‘You don’t see many of them around here.’ Also read to us by the fabulous Lisa.

Alison Lester, My Dog Bigsy (Penguin Australia 2015)

A fabulous Alison Lester book. It belongs to the genre where a main character wanders about a farm greeting all the other animals, and does it very well. The images have interestingly textured backgrounds, which is something I haven’t seen in Alison Lester’s work before. As I’m reading so many books where farm animals are introduced to the young reader, I realise how different my granddaughter’s start to life is from mine – I spent my first 12 years living on a farm. I loved the exoticism of books where children lived in villages and could talk to someone in the house next door. She walks out the front door to cars, neighbours and the sounds of urban life – nature is at a premium, and books are a way of learning its importance.

Jan Mark (words) and Charlotte Voake (images), Fur (1986,Walker Books 2014)

The late Jan Mark wrote some superb books for young readers. This is a ‘first story’ that shows she could do it for the very young as well. A cat likes to sleep in ‘my’ hat. Behold, one day half a dozen kittens have joined her in the hat. It’s more than 30 years old now, though this is a new edition. Maybe the images of kittens and broad-brimmed straw hat come from a different era, but its appeal is still strong. I picked this up off the library shelf and it elicited several exclamations of ‘More!’

Pamela Allen, Mr Archimedes Bath (Puffin 1980)

It was a joy to rediscover this on Ruby’s shelves – a library book I think. It was Pamela Allen’s first book, and is a kind of early version of the sublime Who Sank the Boat?, with added nakedness to compensate for the slightly less elegant narrative line. Mr Archimedes and his animal friends have their baths together and want to figure out who is responsible for the water spilling. It’s fun, and possibly lays the groundwork for later learning about displacement of liquids and the actual Archimedes’ Eureka moment

My Dog Bigsy and Mr Archimedes’ Bath are the thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth books I’ve read as part of the 2019 Australian Women Writers Challenge. I’ll say it again: though Pamela Allen is a New Zealander and lives there now, she lived and worked for a long time in Australia, including when she created this book.

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Ruby Reads (13)

Posted on 12 July 2019 | Leave a comment

When I started writing about books I’ve met thanks to my granddaughter Ruby, I hesitated to include more than one book by a given author. But there are authors who turn up again and again, so here are a couple of books by repeat authors. But first, some read-alouds from Rhyme Time at the library.

Allie Busby, Feeding Time (Just Like Me!) (Childs Play Intl Ltd 2018)

This is a very simple book, with very simple illustrations, and flaps. It worked beautifully with under-twos at the library. The ‘just like me’ of the title evidently indicates a series it belongs to, and it’s also a refrain, as one lifted flap after another reveals the food an animal eats, and that food is also one that humans eat. The illustrations aren’t in the same class as Jim Arnosky’s Man Gave Names to All the Animals but the book’s sweet, unstrained assertion of human commonality with other animals is much more the kind of thing I’d want small children to hear.

Penny Dale, Ten in the bed (Walker Books 1990)

While Rhyme Time is primarily an event for small children, it’s also, something rare these days, a place where adults can enjoy singing together. One old thespian attends irregularly and behaves as I would like to – joining in the songs with unembarrassed pleasure and beaming appreciation of the librarian’s performance and of the children’s sometimes disruptive enthusiasm. This book lifted most of us to his level. The richly coloured illustrations are full of little jokes, and the text rings changes on the familiar song (each ‘one’ who rolls out is a different toy).

Doctor Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go (1990)

I blogged about The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham in pre-grandfatherdom days (the blog post is here). Both of them are still going strong as far as our family is concerned.

Oh, the Places You’ll Go is the last Dr Seuss book published in his lifetime. It’s weirdly abstract both in its geometric illustrations and its non-specific text, but it’s got the characteristic verbal energy and visual quirkiness that keep his books interesting (for me at least).

Doctor Seuss (text) and George Booth (illustrator), Wacky Wednesday (1974)

Originally written over the name Theo LeSieg, this has clearly been welcomed into the general Dr Seuss canon. It’s meant for readers older that 18 and a two-thirds months, but Ruby requests it regularly. It’s essentially a series of spreads in which the reader is invited to find out what’s wrong with the illustrations. The text provides a slender narrative thread and tells the reader how many wacky things they can find on each spread. It has no appeal for me at all, and I can’t tell what Ruby enjoys in it, given that her sense of what’s ‘normal’ is (I believe) still developing – why is it odd that one of the girls on the cover image has no legs but not odd that three identical girls, identically clothed, are walking and gesturing in unison? Such questions are purely academic.

Julia Donaldson (text) and Rebecca Cobb (illustrator), The Paper Dolls (Macmillan Children’s Books 2012)

I’m please to say that Ruby’s tastes and mine sometimes coincide. This book is an example, though I don’t know what Ruby finds interesting in it. A little girl has a chain of five paper dolls – Ticky and Tacky and Jackie the Backie and Jim with two noses and Jo with the bow – who have a string of adventures. Happily, the adventures involve a gigantic crocodile, thereby meeting one of our current preoccupations. If only they’d met a kookaburra it would have been a perfect book.

There are more books, and there will be more blog posts about them.

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Ruby Reads III

Posted on 4 March 2019 | 1 comment

Though Ruby likes to have the same book read to her over and over, she has still managed to accumulate quite a library, and casts her reading net wide. Here are some more titles from her bookshelf (and floor).

Michael Rosen & Helen Oxenbury, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt (Walker Books 1989)

Many people, in Australia at least, might be forgiven for thinking this is a spin-off from the Play School song with the same words, but I think I’m right in saying that the book came first. It’s a brilliant ear-worm of a read-aloud, complete with sound effects of grass, mud, forest and other obstacles that must be gone – not over, or under, or around, but through.

Jill McDonald, Hello World! Birds (Doubleday 2017)

I promise I’m not going to mention in my log every board book in Ruby’s collection. Let this one stand in for a dozen, including Cats and Kittens (a favourite).

It’s a thrill to be with a small child as she learns to turn the pages of a book, and to indicate which images excite her attention. This is a book that allows that to happen. (And there are plenty of board books that don’t judge their readership as well as this one.)

Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, Monkey Puzzle (Alison Green 2009)

Here’s a terrific ‘onion book’ (thanks to Ann Knight Bell in the comments for the term). I love the fabulous drawings of the little monkey who goes looking for his mother, and the range of animals who don’t make the grade, and the wit of the text as each candidate has some feature of the mother, but none of the essential quality, finally revealed, that she must look like the little monkey. Ruby loves the book, but turns the page once that page’s candidate has been named.

Matthew Van Fleet, with photographs by Brian Stanton, Moo (Simon & Schuster/Paula Wiseman Books (2011)

Matthew Van Fleet has a whole string of beautifully produced, hefty picture books with pop-ups and moveable parts. This is the first one I encountered. There are also Dance, and Dog (in which a cat appears under the very last flap, and certain presenters of the book make sure it’s a very noisy appearance.)

HTML for Babies (Sterling Children’s Books, 2016)

I really don’t get this. The web description website says, ‘These concept books will familiarize young ones with the kind of shapes and colors that make up web-based programming language and give them the head start they need.’ (It seemed appropriate to leave the US spelling unchanged.) It’s impossible to read aloud, as nothing in it makes sense. I guess it’s for browsing and taking in the visuals

Margaret Wild and Ann James, Lucy Goosey (Little Hare Books 2008)

Oooh! Another perfect picture book. Ann James’s little geese (goslings doesn’t seem the right word) are very sweet, and the story about Lucy, who is enjoying her life but doesn’t want to go flying because it’s so scary, is suitably reassuring: in the end she finds the courage because her mother reassures her she will always be there. So far Ruby seems to like pointing at the pictures most, but I like the word ‘whiffling’, for the sound made by the wings of grown-up geese.

Lucy Goosey is the eighth book I’ve read for the 2019 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

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More Ruby reads

Posted on 22 February 2019 | 5 comments

So many books in Ruby’s house, so little time. I may be doing a weekly blog post for a while to come. Given that the projected life of a children’s book is alarmingly short, it’s heartening to see so many relatively ancient books here.

Leo Leonni, Inch by Inch (1962)

This was Leo Lionni’s first picture book. Not as spectacular as Swimmy, perhaps, it’s still splendid. The tiny inch worm saves itself from being eaten by offering to measure parts of various birds, and finally by rising to the challenge of measuring the nightingale’s song. For small readers, there’s a bit of a Where’s Wally thing going on as the tiny worm appears in every spread. For big ones (including grandparents) there are more sophisticated joys in the spare text and elegant paintings.

Jackie French and Bruce Whatley, Baby Wombat’s Week (Angus & Robertson 2009)

This is a sequel to Diary of a Wombat that won hearts and prizes all over the place in 2002. Who doesn’t love a wombat? And this one’s a baby. Again, the images are probably too complex and the humour too sly for tiny people. But this is wonderful.

Pat Hutchins, Rosie’s Walk (Macmillan 1967)

This is a board book supplied by us grandparents. Its place in our affections is at least as firmly established as The Very Hungry Caterpillar‘s. It’s a classic example of illustrations telling a story of which the verbal text pretends to be oblivious. The bright, patterned illustrations are, of course, gorgeous.

Giles Andreae and Guy Parker-Rees, Giraffes Can’t Dance (2001)

This one doesn’t appeal to me so much, but it’s on high demand in Ruby land, possibly because one of her favourite toys has been a squeaky giraffe named Sophie. The Giraffe in the book is mocked by the other animals because it can’t dance. It wanders off a communes with the moon and the wind, and soon is dancing spectacularly: given how very ungainly the giraffe is in the first part of the boo, there’s something dispiritingly unrealistic in the moral is that everyone can dance if the music is right.

John Klassen, I Want My Hat Back (Walker 2011)

Jon Klassen is a Canadian minimalist picturebook maker. As far as I can tell this is the first of a trilogy about a bear and his beloved hat. The bear, who doesn’t change much from page to page, asks a number of other animals, some of them of indeterminate species, if they’ve seen his hat. We see the hat long before he does (another example of an illustration alerting the reader to something the text is unaware of), and there’s a bloodthirsty and punitive but funny twist in the tale, which I hope young readers generally miss.

Bob Graham, Vanilla Ice Cream (Walker 2014)

Bob Graham! Evidently he’s even more popular in France than in his native Australia. This picture book is the work of an assured master – possibly in his Late Style. A sparrow accidentally hides away in a bag of rice loaded onto a ship in an Indian port. When the ship arrives in a southern land (a non-specific Australian city), the sparrow emerges and flies to a nearby park. There, a dog leaps up towards him and knocks an ice cream out of someone’s hands. The ice cream lands in the lap of a baby in a stroller, and that’s the first time that baby tastes vanilla ice cream. A weird non-plot, you might say. But he pulls it off!

Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, The Snail and the Whale (Puffin 2006)

A strange tail of a snail with an itchy foot who hitches a ride to exotic places on the tail of a whale and comes back to inspire the other snails to go adventuring, having saved the whale’s life by writing a message in slime on a classroom blackboard. Surrealism is alive and well in children’s picture books. This one is way too old for Ruby, but she has two copies, one in the profusion of books and toys in a corner of the living room and one beside her cot.

Anna Dewdney, Llama Llama Red Pajama (2005)

A gauge of the success of this book is that Mr Blue Pencil didn’t notice the US spelling in its title until I wrote it for this bog post. It’s a bedtime story with bright colours, bouncy rhymes (as long as you pronounce mama to rhyme with llama). There’s a fear-of-the-dark moment that might be a bit suggestive for some children. But the relationship between ht young llama and the llama mama is warm and loving, even if she does answer the phone when the young one needs her desperately at the bedside.

Baby Wombat’s Week is the seventh book I’ve read for the 2019 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

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