Review of Celeste A Day in the Park by Martin Matje

I am all in favor of children's books having a moral. In the tradition of some of Dr. Seuss's greatest stories, my personal favorite being Horton Hears A Who, I think picture books can be persuasive without being moralistic or scary or threatening. Matje's Celeste is clever in ways that parents will appreciate and is silly in ways kids will appreciate, and manages to teach a lesson at the same time.

The story is about a little girl, Celeste, and her "pet," a teddy bear named Timovitc Radetski (who goes by the nickname Tim). The plot is quite simple: Celeste and Tim head to the park for a picknick where a duck steals one of Celeste's vanilla cucumber sandwiches. Celeste, outraged by the duck's unrestrained theft of her sandwich, runs after him. A large (VERY LARGE) police officer intervenes on the duck's behalf, and Celeste is left powerless.

Matje has rapidly brought the story to a complex situation and one that suggests the powerlessness that must be a frustratingly common experience for kids. The solution, however, is wonderfully simple. Tim steps in, negotiates between Celeste and the duck, and resolves the standoff. The final pages show that all it took to make peace was three sandwiches, one for Tim, one for Celeste and one for the duck!

That Matje wrote and illustrated the book must have led to the integration of text and picture. Many pages have lettering incorporated into the illustration, or in places where there is "regular text" special words are set off in color, in a different size, or in a cursive-type script. The words become a part of the dynamic, graphic composition.

Most of the watercolor illustrations have the types of details kids love to pick out: a taxi on the city street, a bird and some bees or a snail and some flowers, all found in the park. The way Matje draws Celeste reflects careful observation of real children. She has a range of emotional states, she is either calm and contented or she is hysterical, anxious, stunned, or chagrined. The dramatic expressions she exhibits would make it easy for any child to "read" how she feels in a given situation.

But my favorite part is that in the end Celeste makes things right by letting go of her inital selfish impulse and nuturing her newfound friends with homemade sandwiches. We can't always expect our children to instinctively share or to automatically think of others, but we can hope that with a little coaxing they'll see the value of compromise.

Review of The Witch's Children by Ursula Jones Illustrated by Russell Ayto

This is a book that was recommended to me by my sister-in-law, who is as passionate about great kids' books as I am. In fact, it was one my husband read to my pregnant belly before our son (who will be three in April) was born.

The story is about three witch's children who visit the park and get into trouble by doing magic they aren't skilled enough to undo. The story is inventive, unpredictable, and has a great twist at the end that is quite clever. There is enough repetition for young children to understand the structure of the book, but not so much that it's mind-numbing for parents. It's not scary (the witch is a typical mom who bails her kids out when they get into trouble) and it has a happy ending but if you are very religious and are opposed to the idea of witches this might not be the book for you.

The illlustrations are wonderful - I think Russell Ayto is incredibly talented. One aspect I just love is that the story is set on a windy day (you don't realize how unusual it is to have weather factor in to a children's story until you see an example where it does) and Ayto's drawings have a stylized treatment that exaggerates the wind - the children's hair blows directly to the left, and trees lean 90 degrees from vertical making the strength of the wind palpable. He varies his methods for creating episodic information - sometimes two side-by-side panels contain consequtive events, in other cases a series of small drawings cascade down the page to indicate the chronology. At times the action is set in an environmental context (the park) and at other times the drawings are simply placed on a field of graduated color.

I particularly like the way the book's design incorporates the text with the illustrations - in places words are much larger for emphasis, or slant this way and that as they appear to blow in the wind. Ayto's sense of pattern, color, and design make it an appealing visual experience and could easily inspire a clever interior designer to create a room based on its stripes, polka dots and color combinations.