Pamela Porter's backlist landed all-of-a-piece on my TBR with I'll Be Watching. Yellow Moon, Apple Moon is aimed at the earliest readers. It provides a lovely transition-from-board-books option. [Next on my Pamela Porter list, if you're curious, arranged in order of readers' ages: Sky (prose, 8-12) and The Crazy Man (free verse,
Rigoberta Menchú Tum is telling the stories of her Mayan girlhood in The Girl from Chimel. (So it turns out that you can discover a Nobel Peace Prize winner by reading a storybook, by dabbling in the backlist of a favourite indie press.) Although born into poverty in
"If we’re lucky, art can help us through our wolfishness."* And it does, indeed, help Virginia get through her wolfishness. As does her sister, Vanessa. And the painting of Bloomsberry. What's this? A children's book about Virginia Woolf? But we all know how THAT story ends. And, yet,
"Not far from here, I have seen a house held up by the hands of trees. This is its story." So states the title page of this illustrated work with prose by Ted Kooser (who has won a Pulitzer Prize for his poetry) and images by Jon Klassen.
The story begins in spring, with the trees greening, but the talk is all of pumpkins. It's too soon to plant pumpkins, Grandpa says, because they need real heat. "And bees. Pumpkins need bees." For many young readers, this will be new -- and startling -- information. "We'll
