Dream Collaborations

If anyone can get Daniel Merriam or Os Gemenos to illustrate a children's book I will give them 200-300 dollars.

...

Once I can afford a larger offer I will make one. For now it's more to make my point, which is CAN YOU IMAGINE? I think my new hobby is playing 'dream collaboration' where I match up a storyteller with an artist and then convince them to make a childrens book together.

Daniel Merriam, a master and pioneer of the imaginary realism art movement and a total BAMF with watercolors:

 Os Gemeos, the powers behind my favorite street art in NYC...

 

Dashing Daniel Merriam                                    Os Gemeos means 'twins' in Portugese.

AWESOME. JUST AWESOME...

love, 

me

Makin Bank, Gettin Robbed

 Imagine, by Alison Lester

and

A Day With Wilbur Robinson by William Joyce

So the other day I got a call from my roomate with some bad news- my apartment had been broken into. They took a laptop, a wii, an x box, a video camera, and my roomate jon for secret reasons haha not really! They also took my little silver necklace with a heart in the center (which was filled with little diamonds... and was of sentimetal value). And so on. It was very bad...

BUT I WAS IN THE BEST CHILDRENS BOOKSTORE IN NEW YORK CITY. And so I was in my happy place, and the news hit me less like a brick and more like a koosh ball. With delayed-action poison on it.

I bought myself a couple books, which is big- I never buy books, but I needed the retail therapy. They are great- the first is so cute and educational! and the second has really super illustrations (I wasn't crazy about the text... I would have even preferred a silent story). Imagine is the perfect book for learning about ANIMALS!

 

Bank Street Bookstore is on 112th street and Broadway in Manhattan and has two floors packed with books. There are even games and tons of teaching materials. Each wall is seven shelves high, and there are so many books that for the most part the only way to browse is via spine. I was particularly excited by the ladders on wheels... anytime I feel like I've stepped into Disney's Beauty and the Beast, its a good thing. (Bank Street bookstore would be the bookstore in Belle's village. The Beast's Library is more like the library in the Morgan Museum on Madison Ave. But he was a collector of medieval illuminated manuscripts, which sometimes had brilliant illustrations but were not necessarily as fun to read as kids lit.)

                                       Belles Bank St. Bookstore    The Beast's Beauteous Bibliotheque

I cannot laud this place enough. It has everything. And somehow, finding it has inspired me to commit a bit harder to this interest of mine- beyond blogging, I want to be on the mailing lists, in the clubs, I want to do storytimes, maybe even try to get a job in childrens publishing...
Love from above and below
me

Of Mice, Moles, and Me

The Subway Mouse written and illustrated by Barbara Reid

Eeny, Meeny, Miney Mole by Jane Yolen, illustrated by Kathryn Brown

I'm trying to do this thing where I review a book and then mention a book from my childhood which I basically associate with it, or have been reminded of by it. Today we go into the underground...

Every time I see rats running along the subway in New York I gaze after them thinking about what a great children's book their lives would make. Probably ever since reading things like the Rats of Nimh or the Littles or even the Boxcar Children I'm mad about stories of tiny scavengers making it in the big bad grown-up human society!

I both loved the book and was dissapointed by it. The 'illustrations' are all photographs of scenes made from clay- I like how this techinique allows for the mice to horde real things like stamps or boxes or trinkets or, most interestingly, a little white feather that the mouse, who dreams of going to the beautiful yet deadly 'Tunnel's End', prizes very highly. The idea of 'tunnel's end' was lovely in execution- living in the subways your whole life and then emerging to a blossoming summer night under a wide, wide starry sky (what NYC subway tunnel emerges in an Eden like that)! However, the book could have been at least twice as long, to make up for the fact that the idea itself was not wildly original. The white feather sticks out but is  not at all fully utilized as a storytelling device. I remember so clearly that the Littles have postage stamps as paintings, that the boxcar children feel elated when they find some dinnerware, and the Nimh rats use christmas lights to light their tunnels.

The childhood book I was reminded of, Eeny Meeny Miney Mole, is about a little Mole (Eeny) who has never been to what her and her older sisters (Meeny and Miney) call 'Up Above'. In her world 'dark was light, day was night, and summer and winter seemd the same'. Eeny wanders underground and meets a worm, a centipede and a snake who tell her about Up Above- which her sisters deny ("Don't listen to addlepated centipedes'' or "never even speak to snakes"). Eeny wonders if light spreads like a blanket, or if it touches in and out like the thread in the hem of a dress. I particularly remembered how the centipede used the bulb of a jonquil as a periscope to view Up Above. The watercolors by Brown as also beautiful- as one reviewer put it, "The palette of befogged earth tones is complemented by scattered spots of luminescence when lanterns, fire and glass light up the underworld."

Though its quite silly, I feel I should disclaim that my unbridled love for Yolen and Brown comes not just from their talent and, especially in Yolen's case, staggeringly prolific work. Yolen attended undergraduate and graduate school in my hometown/neighboring town, and is well known in the area- as is Brown. (My hometown of Northampton, MA is home to countless cartoonists and childrens book authors/illustrators, the now-closed Words and Pictures Museum, and the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art,) I'm sentimental. I mean, it was in the Eric Carle Museum that I first really acknowledged how interested in Childrens books I was- on my third visit I saw a whole bevy of local artisits and illustrators signing books in the lobby and got totally starstruck by almost every single one. Yolen/Brown had signed copies of Muledred and Eeny Meeny for me as a child, but at age 19 I was shy about going up to them for some reason! What I'm saying is, if you're unfamiliar with Jane Yolen, Shame on You.

Love,

Arla

What a wimpy kid

Diary of a Wimpy Kid (movie and book): written and illustrated by Jeff Kinney


The other night I did a little reading of the super-popular "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" and then went to see the movie (by myself at 10pm on a friday night cuz I'm AWESOME). For some reason I was against those books at first for no good reason. As in my reason was that the book was overflowing with cliches- the know it all girl, the mean gym teacher, the three bullies, the dweeby best friend, the obnoxious older brother, the kind of kooky dad, the way too nice mom, and so on. I had no interest in reading another book about a kid making it through middle school the the most predictable of ways with the most predictable of supporting characters.

Boo on me, because the book is fun! It would only be half as fun, though, without those cartoons.

  Not only are they really adorable but they play with the timing of the text in such a way that makes it read at a gallop. Also, one might think with the title that the books would be, at least in some way, about a kid triumphing over his wimpiness, but au contrare! He fails heavily, and must learn to own it. And keenly made observations about middle school always so fun and relateable. The terror inspired by the "cheese touch" - which began when some kid touched the moldy cheese on the blacktop- is so real. Puberty is hilarious! (best line ever: "How can a butt be cute? Its a butt!")

Its also refreshing to have a movie made about a kid in middle school that's just about a kid in middle school- he doesn't have secret powers or find a magic jump rope or something (Percy Jackson- sigh). Even better, probably because author Jeff Kinney was very involved in the film, they keep a lot of cartoons in the movie, and the dialogue sticks to the book like elmers. And the kid actors are awesome!

The only thing I simply MUST say about the movie is that the little speech Greg gives at the end to his whole school is a bit confusing in it's message. He goes on about how middle school is dumb and pointless, and the kids unnecessarily judgemental. Mostly true- the wierd girl under the bleachers reading Howl (nice touch there) is all for it- but these are the same kids that embraced his losery best friend for drawing zany cartoons, wearing whatever he wants and performing horrific choreographed numbers with his mother at the mother-son dance. Maybe the issue isn't who is and isn't cool, but who has and doesn't have confidence in his coolness.
   

 

Greg is embarassed!                          Dont be, Moms are cool!

The end of the movie- where Greg finally makes the 'class favorites' page in the yearbook not in the way he wanted (by trying to be cool while dissing/ditching his best friend all the time) but by being voted 'cutest friends' (because he made up for his bad friendness) is perfect. All I missed was a conclusion that was as even-handed in its view of the kids as the rest of the movie.
But yeah. see the movie! I laughed out loud a lot! And I was by myself!

love,
some wimpy lady
p.s. wanna read some wimpy kid? go here! 
p.p.s. I did notice but chose to ignore that this is much like Lizzy Maguire for boys with the cartoon interjections and such. But it should be said. In some ways this might make you think 'Lizzy maguire for boys'.

If you give a ME a cupcake...

If You Give a Cat a Cupcake, written by Laura Numeroff and illustrated by Felicia Bond.

Hello, bibliophiles! My fellow cupcake enthusiast, Veronica, gave me this book as a birthday present, because I love cats and cupcakes (but really, who doesn't?) and I enjoyed it- but not nearly as much as If you Give a Moose a Muffin or a Mouse a Cookie. But for some reason it annoys me that the book is rather illogical. Even if the cats, mouses etc are doing a kind of free-association jumparound from activity to activity, I like when it has some kind of cohesion, like the Cat in the Hat's domestic chaos, or even the mess that piles up in the little girls home when she gives a Moose a Muffin. I think in the cat/cupcake book, they go to the beach for no reason, or something (I gave the book to a little girl named Franky so I can't double check).

If you're going to have an total attention deficit disorder, go for it! like,

If you give a possum a latke, he'll want to put it on his bike. But he won't have a bike. So you'll give him a bike to ride. That will make him angry. So he'll want to go to the zoo. He'll run around freeing all the animals with his superpowers. When you finally catch him, he'll be sleepy. So you'll give him your bed to sleep in. As you sit there wondering why you're being so nice to this possum, an elephant will come barging into your room. This will remind the possum of the beach. He will want to go there. When you get there the possum will dissapear. Five days later he will show up at your door with some kind of implant in his brain. This will make you concerned. You'll offer him a latke...

 Being a cupcake enthusiast, I also want to recommend a few places to anyone who lives in or is planning to visit New York City: Cupcakeland (390 Metropolitan Ave. in Brooklyn near the Metropolitan/Lorimer stop on the L train) and Dessert Club Chickalicious (203 E.10th street between 1st and 2nd avenues in Manhattan). Trust me... I've been around a few cupcake blocks.

Green Tea cupcakes @ Cupcakeland

Chickadeliciousness

Much love

Arla

p.s. I still think the mouse/cookie, moose/muffin books arent too far out, and i havent read the mouse/school, mouse/movies books. I do remember having a logic problem with the pig and the pancake but the pig was too cute for me to care very much.

Books (and cupcakes) of Wonder

Hello!!

I know I have been a bit remiss in my book reviewing. There are many reasons for this, to be sure- I am homeless and I don't have a computer, those are the first two. And, as you might imagine, I spend the majority of my time trying to solve those problems, or eating, or rollerblading, or looking a large bodies of water in silent reflection.

THANK GOODNESS, then, for Books of Wonder! When the World feels like a bull and I feel like I am barely astride it, this children's bookstore at 18 W.18th street in Manhattan serves as a pair of enormous sturdy horns to grasp onto. Most of the time I go there by myself to read books for a few hours, though I try to arrange for social or buisness meetings to occur at the store as well, so as to both increase the time I spend there and spread the joy to others!

 

The store is not totally exhaustive- someplace like the Strand is bound to have titles that Books of Wonder does not- but they have an extensive collection nonetheless, the place is clean and kid-friendly, there's always some artwork hanging in the back and old, rare, collectible children's books locked away in glass cases. ALSO, it is also connected to the Cupcake Cafe, which has the most adorably upholstered tuffets and chairs (ladybug and leaf patterns- oh-my-god) and the sweetest little wooden tables, each of which is a different animal. There are 3 enormous can-can dancing (yes, turn on a switch and they dance) lady cupcakes above the counter area, there is of course milk, juice boxes, etc. for the kids. The cakes and cupcakes are just BEAUTIFUL. I recommend the mocha frosting, as the frosting is the best part, and I would take one of the cupcakes that are kept in the pretty little display box at room temperature, not one of the cold ones in the big display.

Seriously, if you ever have any time to kill,  get your tuchus over to Books of Wonder and the Cupcake Cafe. You could be sleeping in a box and playing tiddliwinks with the subway rats later that night and you would be as happy as a clam.

All my love
Arla