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Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans
By Kadir Nelson
Balzer and Bray (an imprint of Harper Collins)
$19.99
ISBN: 978-0-06-173074-0
Ages 9-12
On shelves now

Humans tend to be a highly visual species. When folks tell you not to judge a book by its cover, that’s an optimistic sentiment rather than a rule. People like to judge by covers. Often we haven’t time to inspect the contents of all the books we see, so the jackets bear the brunt of our inherent skepticism. With this in mind, Kadir Nelson has always had an edge on the competition. If the man wants to get you to pick up a book, he will get you to pick up a book. You often get a feeling that while he doesn’t really care when it comes to the various celebrities he’s created books for over the years (Spike Lee, Debbie Allen, Michael Jordan’s sister, etc.) when it’s his own book, though, THAT is when he breaks out the good brushes. Nelson wrote We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball a couple years ago to rave reviews. Now he’s dug a little deeper to provide us with the kind of title we’ve needed for years. Heart and Soul gives us a true overview of African Americans from start to near finish with pictures that draw in readers from the cover onwards. This is the title every library should own. The book has heart. The pictures have soul.

An old woman stands in front of a portrait in the Capitol rotunda in Washington D.C. Bent over she regards the art there, recounting how it was black hands that built the Capitol from sandstone. “Strange though . . . nary a black face in all those pretty pictures.” Looking at them you would swear black people hadn’t been here from the start, but that’s simply not true. With that, the woman launches into the history of both our nation and the African Americans living in it, sometimes through the lens of her own family. From Revolutionary War soldiers to slavers, from cowboys to union men, the book manages in a scant twelve chapters to offer us a synthesized history of a race in the context of a nation’s growth. An Author’s Note rounds out the book, along with a Timeline, a Bibliography, and an Index.

Kadir Nelson, insofar as I can tell, enjoys driving librarian catalogers mad. When he wrote We Are the Ship some years ago he decided to narrate it with a kind of collective voice. The ballplayers who played in the Negro Leagues speak as one. Normally that would slip a book directly into the “fiction” category, were it not for the fact that all that “they” talk about are historical facts. Facts upon facts. Facts upon facts upon facts. So libraries generally slotted that one into their nonfiction sections (the baseball section, if we’re going to be precise) and that was that. Now “Heart and Soul” comes out and Nelson has, in a sense, upped the ante. Again the narrator is fictional, but this time she’s a lot more engaged. The Greek

*sniff sniff*

Smell that?  That’s the sweet smell of an upcoming award season.  It’s already beginning to drift our way from the future.  Things are clearly heating up since we’re seeing two award-based blogs up and running.  For Newbery fans Heavy Medal has already come out of the gate swinging.  Between the inevitable comparison between Okay for Now and Dead End in Norvelt to a discussion of how to consider Wonderstruck (more on that in a second) and Jonathan Hunt’s plea for a little editing regarding 300+ paged books (there are a couple I’ve read this year that could have used a machete) there’s a lot to chew on already.

On the Caldecott side is Calling Caldecott, Horn Book Magazine’s answer to the Caldecott void.  Not much is up and running there yet, but stay tuned.  More is on the way.

For my part, it’s time for the third in our four part prediction series.  If you’ll recall, back in the spring my heart was captured by the newest Penderwicks and The Secret River.  Mid-year came along and suddenly I was making eyes at Tony Abbott and Philip Stead.  Now fall has arrived and it’s time to cool things down a bit.  The big contenders are separating themselves out.  Things are in motion.  Favorites are garnering fans.  And me?  I just figured out this year’s theme.

See, every year I like to apply a big generalized stamp on the Newbery/Caldecott year.  I throw titles at them like “Wild Card Year” or “Breaking Boundaries Year”.  Technically, according to my formula, this year should be another Breaking Boundaries year, but I’ve decided to give it a different name.  After looking at the contenders I’m calling 2012 The Year of the Bridesmaids.  Which is to say, I could easily see the gold going to two fellers (Gary D. Schmidt and Kadir Nelson) who have always won Honors but never the medals outright.  But let’s just see what I think of some of the upcoming contenders:

2012 Newbery Predictions

Okay for Now by Gary Schmidt – Still the one to beat.  After the initial lovefest a small backlash arose from people complaining about two major parts of the novel: The Broadway elements (or maybe just the New Yorkers have complained about that) and the dad’s seeming suddenly-I-love-purdy-flowers turnaround.  Personally, I think these elements will give the Newbery committee a lot of stuff to chew on, but books that do well in Newbery voting are the ones with heart.  And Schmidt really does get the reader emotionally involved.  Will that be enough to push it over the top?  I’d h

Never Forgotten
By Patricia C. McKissack
Illustrated by Leon and Diane Dillon
Schwartz & Wade
$18.99
ISBN: 978-0-375-84384-6
Ages 4 and up
On shelves October 11, 2011

The more I read children’s literature the more I come to realize that my favorite books for kids are the ones that can take disparate facts, elements, and stories and then weave them together into a perfect whole. That someone like Brian Selznick can link automatons and the films of Georges Melies in The Invention of Hugo Cabret or Kate Milford can spin a story from the history of bicycles and the Jake Leg Scandal in The Boneshaker thrills me. Usually such authors reserve their talents for chapter books. There they’ve room to expound at length. And Patricia McKissack is no stranger to such works of fiction. Indeed some of her chapter books are the best in a given library collection (I’ve a personal love of her Porch Lies). But for Never Forgotten Ms. McKissack took tales of Mende blacksmiths and Caribbean legends of hurricanes and combined them into a picture book. Not just any picture book, mind you, but one that seeks to answer a question that I’ve never heard adequately answered in any books for kids: When Africans were kidnapped by the slave trade and sent across the sea, how did the people left behind react? The answer comes in this original folktale. Accompanied by the drop dead gorgeous art of Leo & Diane Dillon, the book serves to remind and heal all at once. The fact that it’s beautiful to both eye and ear doesn’t hurt matters much either.

When the great Mende blacksmith Dinga found himself with a baby boy after his wife died he bucked tradition and insisted on raising the boy himself. For Musafa, his son, Dinga called upon the Mother Elements of Earth, Fire, Water and Wind and had them bless the child. Musafa grew in time but spent his blacksmithing on creating small creatures from metal. Then, one day, Dinga discovers that Musafa has been kidnapped by slave traders in the area. Incensed, each of the four elements attempts to help Dinga get Musafa back, but in vain. Finally, Wind manages to travel across the sea. There she finds Musafa has found a way to make use of his talent with metal, creating gates in a forge like no one else’s. And Dinga, back at home, is comforted by her tale that his son is alive and, for all intents and purposes, well.

McKissack’s desire to give voice to the millions of parents and families that mourned the kidnapping of their children ends her book on a bittersweet note. After reading about Musafa’s disappearance and eventual life, the book finishes with this: “Remember the wisdom of Mother Dongi: / ‘Kings may come and go, / But the fam

The Cazuela That the Farm Maiden Stirred
By Samantha R. Vamos
Illustrated by Rafael Lopez
Charlesbridge
$17.95
ISBN: 978-1-58089-242-1
Ages 4-8
On shelves now

I am lucky to work in a children’s room with a significantly sized bilingual section. The books you’ll find there cover a wide range of languages. Chinese, Arabic, Urdu, you name it. Of them the largest section by far is the Spanish language section. Of course, what we don’t really include in this section are books that integrate Spanish words into English text, though the stories are predominantly in English. There really isn’t a name for this kind of book, which is a real pity since they serve a definite use. Now you can go about integrating Spanish and English any old way you prefer, but Samantha Vamos has you beat. According to the back bookflap “Samantha R. Vamos was cooking one day when the idea for this book popped into her head.” The idea goes beyond a mere food related plot and ends up being one of the most creative ways of working Spanish elements into a work of English I’ve seen in years. Top off the fact that the art is enough to give your jaw a downward plunge, and I’d say you were dealing with one of the cleverer picture books of the year.

Are you familiar with the cumulative tale format? Well Ms. Vamos takes the idea and twists it a little. A variety of different farm animals aid a farmer and a farm maiden as they work together to make some rice pudding. A donkey picks limes, a duck buys sugar, a hen grates, and by the end everyone has done their part. Of course, in the midst of some dancing the pudding almost gets out of hand, but our heroes are able to save it in time. The end of the book includes a Glossary of Spanish Words and a recipe for the pudding.

I’ll say right here that the way in which Vamos has seamlessly integrated Spanish words into her text is extraordinary. Until now the standard method of doing this was just to throw the words into random sentences and cross your fingers. Best case scenario, you end up with something like Gary Soto’s Chato’s Kitchen. Worst case scenario and the words become jarring and needless. The trick Vamos uses here is to take the cumulative format and make it work for her. Normally a cumulative story doesn’t shake up the words. It’s the old House That Jack Built idea. This did this, that did that, it did it, etc. But Vamos has a different idea going on here. She starts out with an English word on the first reading, then switches that word to its Spanish equivalent when it’s repeated. So the first sentence in the book reads “This is the pot that the farm maiden stirred”. Fair enough. Turn the page and suddenly you read, “This the butter that went into the Cazuela that the farm maiden stirred.” You see what she’s

Blue Chicken
By Deborah Freedman
Viking (an imprint of Penguin)
$15.99
ISBN: 978-0-670-01293-0
Ages 4-8
On shelves September 15th

Call it barnyard self-actualization. Too heavy an idea for a picture book? Fine. How about breaking down the barn’s fourth wall? Or nine barnyard characters in search of an illustrator? However you want to couch it, I think we can probably state for the record that by this point any picture book that shows drawn characters taking on a life of their own is fairly par for the course. It’s not a particularly new or shocking idea. Mischievous chickens are also par for the course. No one can be all THAT surprised by their antics. That said, though these are ideas that make it into children’s books from time to time, until now I’ve not seen anyone specifically combine the two into a single book. Blue Chicken turns out to be the natural descendant of these two notions. Part barnyard antics, part surreal adventure, Deborah Freedman at last returns with a picture book that uses a minimum of words to create for us a fairly complex notion.

On a rainy day on a desk in a home sits an unfinished painting of a sleepy barnyard scene. Curious, one of the chickens in the picture notices the nearby jars of paint just outside of the frame. Unfortunately for her, this natural curiosity leads to an unprecedented spill that threatens to cover every animal in the picture. The ducklings are fairly cool about it, but the other creatures are distinctly displeased. In her effort to make things right, the chicken comes across a clear liquid that manages to wipe out all the unwanted blue except in the sky above. Content, the animals settle down back again. Only the final image in the book suggests where the chicken might be poking her nosy little beak next.

Now normally when drawn characters take their lives into their own hands, the story makes it very clear that these are characters in a book, breaking free of the shackles of the printed page. What’s interesting about Deborah Freedman’s book is that she prefers to imagine worlds where people do the drawing, coloring, and painting. In her previous book, Scribble, the drawings of two little girls come to life and get a little wild across the page. Likewise, in Blue Chicken it’s a drawing on a barnyard that contains all the requisite characters. Freedman isn’t tempted to challenge the very notion of reading a book like David Wiesner did in The Three Pigs or Mordecai Gerstein in A Book.

Ice
By Arthur Geisert
Enchanted Lion Books
$14.95
ISBN: 978-1-59270-098-1
For ages 5 and up
On shelves now

Me and Arthur Geisert, Arthur Geisert and I . . . I wouldn’t say we’ve ever connected, exactly. Over the years I’ve had a hard time getting a grasp on his particular brand of picture book creation. I’m a librarian. I like categories and slots and easy ways to organize my thoughts on one person or another. Geisert sort of rejects that whole idea. His picture books work in and of themselves, but they don’t pander. You don’t pick up a work by the man and feel that it’s trying to ingratiate itself with you. There’s something vaguely unnerving, almost European, about this. We Americans are used to books dipped in glitter and outrageous characters that scream across crowded bookstores and libraries, “PICK ME!!! PICK ME!! I’M THE ONE!!!!” Arthur Geisert books, in comparison, sit quietly in amongst themselves playing a hand of Pinochle or, if they’re feeling particularly daring, maybe a round of Hearts. Should you choose to pick one up to read, it will tip its hat politely to you but make no attempt to smoother you with its marvelousness. All this came to mind when I read one of Geisert’s latest creations. Ice is a simple story focusing on pigs and glaciers.

On long horizontal pages, our wordless tale begins with a look at an island. The sun sits big and low over a series of adapted huts. At one end of the island sits a kind of pit or pool, low on water, where the resident pigs fill up their buckets. That night a conference is called and next thing you know the pigs are hoisting the rigging on their one and only ship. Not content with mere sails, a balloon is inflated and off go the pigs. Soon enough they locate some enormous glaciers. Enterprising to the last, they connect their ship to one such ice chunk (sails are added to help drag it along) and when they return home the ice is put to use. The bulk is added to the pool, but even smaller squares can be put to good use when they become impromptu air-conditioning aids. By the end, the pigs are happy yet again, and the hot days are tempered at last.

Periodically I’ll get folks in my library looking for wordless picture books. There are a number of ways of meeting that need. For my part, I’ve whipped up a little list of our best wordless books (Mirror by Jeannie Baker, The Red Book by Barbara Lehman, Flotsam by David Wiesner, etc.). If I knew Geisert better I could attest as to whether or not he is accustomed to visual narratives. If I were to take a guess though, I’d say he’s done this before. This isn’t one of the easier wordless books, though. It makes you work. When first you see the deep pool, low in its water supply, it’s not immediately apparent what is going on. The pigs throughout the story are pretty good natured about things. When they decide to set out for some ice, there’s aren’t folks who object to this notion. It seems the logical next step, though the reader doesn’t know what’s going on until much later. Geisert makes it evident that if you stick with the story, all will be revealed in time. That�

I know some of you just hate it when award talk starts too early. And certainly ten months before the awards in question. . . well that’s the very definition of early, is it not? But I’ve been doing these for three years now and I rather enjoy them. This is also the first year where I’ve been one-upped. Heavy Medal already came up with a pretty complete list of potential Newbery titles to keep an eye on.

With that in mind, I’ve little faith in my own prediction abilities. Note the following statistics (and read the comments on the posts for a lot of extra fun):

2008 spring predictions: I get one Caldecott right (How I Learned Geography)

2009 spring predictions: I get two Newberys right (The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate and The (Mostly) True Adventures of Homer P Figg)

2010 spring predictions: I get one Newbery right (One Crazy Summer)

2011 spring predictions: ???

Folks, I need to level with you. I’m just not feeling the love this year. As far as I can determine, there are a lot of books out there that are perfectly good, but only a few have I been able to find that carry with them the whiff of potential awards. That’s okay. It’s just springtime. Things don’t perk up until at least halfway through. Still and all, this will be a relatively short prediction list this year. With the full knowledge that I haven’t read everything out there this season:

2012 Newbery Predictions

The Penderwicks at Point Mouette by Jeanne Birdsall – I have a good feeling about this, folks. A good feeling. Sequels, you will find, often win Newbery Awards and Honors long after their preceding novels have earned nothing at all. With that in mind, and knowing as we do that Ms. Birdsall gets better with every subsequent Penderwick book, if there’s going to be a year to hand something to Ms. Birdsall why not make that year 2012? Sure the first Penderwick novel won a National Book Award, but come on! I want a different breed of shiny sticker on these here books. It will, of course, rely on a committee that is inclined to notice how difficult this seemingly simple novel was to write. But if any title is distinguished this yea

Queen of the Falls
By Chris Van Allsburg
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
$18.99
ISBN: 978-0-547-31581-2
Ages 4-9
On shelves April 4^th

The word “daredevil” conjures up different images for different people. Speaking for myself, when I hear it I instantly picture someone like Evel Knievel leaping over cars on a motorcycle. I do not picture sixty-two year old charm school matrons climbing into barrels. The name “Chris Van Allsburg” also conjures up a variety of interesting images. A person might think of his books The Mysteries of Harris Burdick or The Sweetest Fig (or, my personal favorite, The Stranger). And until now, they also would probably not picture sixty-two year old charm school matrons climbing into barrels. Yet now both the word and the author/illustrator have become inextricably linked to one another, and it is all because of a little old lady who died nearly one hundred years ago. For the first time, Chris Van Allsburg has put aside the fantastical for something infinitely more intriguing: Real world history with just a touch of the insane. And it all begins with the first person to ever go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

The facts about the Niagara Falls are well known. “The water drops from a height that is as tall as a seventeen-story building.” Fact of the matter is, you’d have to be nutty to even consider going over such falls. Yet that was the idea that appealed so much to Ms. Annie Edson Taylor. A former charm school teacher, Annie was sixty-two years old and in real need of money. In a flash it came to her: Go over the edge of Niagara Falls in a barrel and reap the rewards that come. Efficient, Annie commissioned the barrel she would travel in, and found folks willing to help her carry out the plan. When the time came, everything went without a hitch and best of all Annie lived to tell the tale. Unfortunately, fame and fortune were not in the cards. Folks weren’t interested in hearing an old woman talk about her death-defying adventure, and on more than one occasion she found her barrel stolen or folks taking credit for her own deed. Ten years later a reporter found her and asked for her story again. Annie confessed that she didn’t become rich like she wanted to, but as she said, “That’s what everyone wonders when they see Niagara . . . How close will their courage let them get to it? Well, sir, you can’t get any closer than I got.”

This is not the first time I have encountered Ms. Taylor’s story. I’m a fan of the podcast Radio Lab, which makes science palatable to English majors like myself. One such podcast told the story of Annie Taylor, and it was a sad tale. So sad, in fact, that when I picked up Queen of the Falls I naturally assumed that Van Allsburg would sweeten, cushion, and otherwise obscure some of the difficulties Annie faced after her fateful trip. To my infinite delight, I found the man to be a sterling author of nonfiction for kids. He doesn’t pad the truth, but at the same time he finds that spark in a true-life story that gives it depth and meaning. On the surface, what could we possibly learn from the depressing reminder of