Picture Books from March 2023
My monthly digest of children's picture book discoveries.
March was a slightly slower month for books and a faster month for things that are not books. But as I am loyal to my post, behold a few nuggets of joy I wisheth to shareth with thee.
As always, clicking the images below will open them up in Instagram, where you can see a selection of pages & more images.
CHARLOTTE AND THE WHITE HORSE by Ruth Krauss and Maurice Sendak. This is one small book I do not yet have in my personal Sendak collection, but the library had a copy on the shelf so I borrowed it to feast my eyeballs upon it. It’s from 1955, during his pre-Wild Things period when he was primarily illustrating for others and not yet writing his own stuff. There is so much tenderness in these illustrations that match the same tenderness in the story. Note the posture of Charlotte with her back turned, while her father leans in to comfort her. Sendak would use this back-turned posture years later in THE SIGN ON ROSIE’S DOOR, capturing a young girl’s sorrow and disillusionment with the realities of the world. But through the flipside of grace, Rosie still gets to be a star and Charlotte still gets to keep her beloved horse.
MISTER CAT-AND-A-HALF - Ukrainian folk tale retold by Ricard Pevear and illustrated by Robert Rayevsky. A strange little gem from 1986 I found on the library shelf. The tale and the drawings are both ferocious and hilarious, wherein a lady fox marries a terrifying cat and terrorizes her neighborhood with him. The facial expressions and weird posing of the characters are a joy, and it has a strange vintage folk art quality you would expect from that twilight period of 1980s picture books when things began to feel more stale and less bold than they were in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
A TALE OF TWO BROTHERS is another traditional tale retold by Eveline Hasler with magnificent illustrations by Kathi Bhend. A mix of black-and-white with muted washes of color at times, the tiny details and beautiful creepiness of these drawings are wondrous to behold.
THIS STORY IS NOT ABOUT A KITTEN by Randall de Seve and Carson Ellis is my first encounter with de Seve’s writing, which is a delightful poem of rhythm, repetition and rhyme to be celebrated and read aloud. Carson Ellis, of course, is one of my favorite artists in the world today, and her work here is wonderfully made with a quality that feels simultaneously vintage and fresh. It’s a treasure of a book about connection and community, and invoked many sense memories of the street I grew up on as a child.
…and finally BEATRICE LIKES THE DARK by April Genevieve Tucholke and Khoa Le is a fantastic book which also has a vintage quality (vintage is the word of the month, kids!) and spins a tale of two sisters — one loves the dark and one loves the light. It reminds me of the characters Wednesday and Enid in the delightful Netflix WEDNESDAY series…same kind of vibe.
That’s it. Happy reading, kids.