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Here are some literary events to pencil in your calendar this week.

To get your event posted on our calendar, visit our Facebook Your Literary Event page. Please post your event at least one week prior to its date.

The next session of the Pen Parentis literary salon will feature four writers: Jonathan Galassi, Tia Williams, Emma McLaughlin, and Nicola Kraus. Hear them on Tuesday, Feb. 9 at Hotel Andaz starting 7 p.m. (New York, NY)

Steve Light will celebrate the launch of his new children’s book, Swap!, at Books of Wonder. Join in on Saturday, Feb. 13 from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. (New York, NY)

Yann Martel will discuss and sign copies of his newest novel, The Highest Mountains of Portugal, at McNally Jackson. Meet him on Saturday, Feb. 13 starting 5 p.m. (New York, NY)

Our selection of hot new releases and popular kids' books has a lot to offer!

I suspect that even if you have only been writing for children for a short while, if you live in the US (and maybe elsewhere) you will know the name Betsy Bird, who was the Youth Materials Selections Specialist of New … Continue reading →

Construction trucks. School buses. Airplanes. You name it, kids can’t get enough of it. Here are a few of our favorite books of Things That Go ... Read the rest of this post

With whimsical, masterful black-and-white art accented with flashes of color, Steve Light draws a lovely follow-up to Have You Seen My Dragon? Kids will love looking for the lost monster — and while they may not notice, they'll be learning all about shapes along the way. Books mentioned in this post

Planes Go

written & illustrated by Steve Light

Chronicle Books      8/12/2014

978-1-4521-2899-3

Age infant to 2     16 pages

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“The helicopter goes, ‘PITTATATATA PITTATATATA PITTATATATATA.’ The jumbo jet goes, ‘Wheeeeeeeee VRRRRRRRRRRUUUHHHHHHHHHMMM.’ The propeller plane goes, ‘HUK HUK HUK WHIRRRRRRR WHIRRRRRR.’ Prepare for liftoff with 8 exiting aircraft and the noises they make in this irresistible board book! The long, oversized format lends itself to the shape of the vehicles and stands out on the shelf, and the boisterous text begs to be read aloud.”

Opening

“The helicopter goes, PITTATATTATA PITTATATTATA PITTATATTATA”

Review

Planes Go will thrill any young boy—and girls, too—who love airplanes, and what child does not? You can sound just like a propeller plane, helicopter, or a blimp, entertaining your youngster as these different flying machines burst from the pages. The pages are extra thick for little hands that sometimes play rough. If jelly from that PB&J slips out from the bread, maybe landing on the supersonic jet, not to worry. The jelly, and most other kid substances, will wipe off the sturdy, glossy board book.

In addition to Planes Go, the series includes Trucks Go, Trains Go, and Diggers Go. The illustrations are colorful and full of the sounds each machine makes as it rumbles through the sky. There is a seaplane, helicopter, propeller plane, fighter plane, blimp, supersonic jet, and the space shuttle. Wherever you want to go, there is a plane to take you there. Read through the book once, adding your best plane imitations with help from the author and your child can take it from there. By the way, those airplanes sounds are examples of onomatopoeia. Brr, swish, whoop, wizz are also examples of onomatopoeia. When you try to imitate the sound anything makes, like a slithering snake, “Ssssssss,” you are using onomatopoeia.

I have a nephew who, when he was two-years-old would have fought me for this book and would want the other three books in the series. He loved cars, trucks, planes, scooters, and anything else that had power and moved. Planes Go, and all the other in the series, will ignite your youngsters imagination as the planes and helicopters take off for places only your child knows. These books are a great way to introduce curious young minds to the vehicles he or she is likely to see when traveling.  The book is longer than normal to accommodate the elongated bodies of many planes. I think this is a great series and youngsters will love the planes and the sounds each one makes, especially if it is mom or dad making those sounds.

PLANES GO. Text and illustrations  copyright © 2014 by Steve Light. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, CA.

Here is an Onomatopoeia Dictionary

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Purchase Planes Go at Amazon—B&N—Book Depository—Chronicle Books—your favorite bookstore.

Learn more about Planes Go HERE.

Meet the author / illustrator, Steve Light, at his website:    http://www.stevelightart.com/

Find more board books at the Chronicle Books website:    http://www.chroniclebooks.com/

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Also by Steve Light

Trucks Go

Trains Go

Diggers Go

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(review HERE)

Have You Seen My Dragon?

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Boats Go (2/01/2015)

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Dana Skwirut is a Youth Services librarian at the Fanwood Memorial Library in Fanwood, NJ, and the Summit Free Public Library in Summit, NJ. She is active in the Tumblarian community and on Twitter, where her sass got her featured in School Library Journal. When she isn’t in Ice Cream story time, she is seeing the world, one tiny road trip at a time.

Have You Seen My Dragon?
By Steve Light
Candlewick Press
$16.99
ISBN: 978-0-7636-6648-4
Ages 2-6
On shelves April 8th

When I grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan I would get this little thrill every time my city appeared in a children’s book. Which is to say, every time it was mentioned in Horton Hatches the Egg. Honestly, for all that it had a cool name it really didn’t come up anywhere else. New York kids must be rather jaded in this regard. Anytime a city book is set somewhere other than Manhattan or Brooklyn, they probably scratch their little heads in confusion (I can attest to this personally as my two-year-old calls any and all cities she sees in books “New York City” and will not be corrected). As a NYC transplant I’d probably mind this more if it weren’t for the fact that so many of these books are so doggone splendid. Take Steve Light’s latest, Have You Seen My Dragon? A riot of miniscule details, numbers, colors, familiar city elements, and a magnificent, fantastic creature always hidden in plain sight, Light gives us a city dragon worth remembering long after the pages are turned.

You would think it would be difficult to mislay a dragon. You would be wrong. When our story begins a young boy is asking a doorman whether or not he’s seen his dragon. “No? I will look for him.” Never you mind that if the boy merely turned his head 90 degrees to the left he’d see his ginormous pet sniffing an understandably wary pup. From here it’s a race across the city. Everywhere the boy goes the numbers go up. The dragon perches atop a hot dog stand where they are selling “2 Hot dogs”. It peers down from a roof at the “3 Buses” below. It gets a quick drink from one of the “5 Water towers.” On the endpapers you can see the circuitous path the dragon takes through a slightly compacted lower Manhattan until, at last, the boy spots him in Chinatown, smiling widely from between the “20 Lanterns”.

There is a perception out there that it is near impossible to publish a black and white picture book in today’s market. This may be so, but Light comes pretty darn close to doing so. Though there is a different color for every number in the book, most of what you’re seeing is just good old-fashioned pen and inks. More to the point, the man has gone rather wild in his details. I haven’t seen intricate work at this level since I read Mark Alan Stamaty’s picture book cult classic Who Needs Donuts? Whether he’s detailing the myriad wires that curl around the sewer pipes below the street or paying homage to the detailing on St. Patrick’s Cathedral, there’s a method to the man’s madness. Now add in the fact that Light isn’t afraid to go vertical with his two-page spreads and that he occasionally gets incredibly creative with his perspective (the “8 Fire hydrants” two-page spread is an exercise in internal logic) and you have a rather beautiful affair. Little wonder that he chose to only dot the pages with color. It’s lovely to watch how the artist uses these colors to direct your eye across the page.

If the name “Steve Light” has been triggering some kind of latent amnesia in your cranium, it probably has to do with his board books with Chronicle Books. Let me tell you right now that if you have not read Trucks Go, Trains Go or Diggers Go aloud to a small child then your life, nice as it is, is little more than a pale hollow shell of what it might someday be. In those three books Light used bright, thick paints to convey an array of vehicles. He then gave each and every one of them original, amazing sounds, ideal of reading aloud either one-on-one or to a large group. Have You Seen My Dragon differs widely from that series in terms of look and feel. But what it does have in common is the age of the audience (toddler heaven is what we have going on here) and the read aloud potential. Good readalouds are rarities. For every 100 picture books published in a given season, maybe four of them are titles you’d like to test on a group of squirmy squirmers. And this, ladies and gentlemen, should be one of those four. It’s simple and interactive and I can already hear a room of small fry screaming at you as to where the dragon is “hiding”.

There may be the occasional New York child that complains that the buses in the book are purple when, in fact, our buses are no such of a thing. Meh. I say purple buses would be a heckuva lot more fun, so if Mr. Light wants to bestow that particular hue to them, let him. And that goes for the blue subway cars as well. Slightly more problematic are the “monkeys”. You will find that for the number 6 one is supposed to find “6 Monkeys”. The zoo picture is, if you follow the map, sort of supposed to be the Central Park Zoo, but it doesn’t really resemble it. That’s okay too. Artistic liberties I am a-okay with. Far more of a problem is the fact that the monkeys in question have no tails. Yup, what we’re dealing with here is a page of six apes. It’s a classic Curious George problem and not one that sinks the book or anything. Still, wouldn’t mind a tail or two on those primates. It would be just the thing.

All told, I see a lot of New York City picture books in a given year. This one goes beyond our city’s borders. It’s the kind of book that’s going to appeal to any kid that’s drawn to the hustle and bustle of a metropolitan area. The words “New York City” never even appear in the text, allowing a lot of young readers to simply think of the location as an everycity. Lithe and lovely, overflowing with good will and copious details, expect the sentence, “Have you seen Have You Seen My Dragon?” to appear on the lips of parents and children everywhere. Because if you haven’t seen it, now’s the time.

On shelves April 8th.

Source: Galley sent from publisher for review.

Like This? Then Try:

• Who Needs Donuts? by Mark Alan Stamaty

• Adele and Simon by Barbara McClintock

• The Bear’s Song by Benjamin Chaud

By Nina Schuyler, The Children’s Book Review
Published: August 9, 2012

What is it about boys and wheels? Yes, I’m making a gross generalization and relying far too heavily on anecdotal evidence, but I don’t see our neighbors with daughters outside at 6:30 am on Garbage Day, watching the parade of garbage trucks go by. All to the delight and squeals of my 14 month old son, a son who bolts up in bed when he hears the first rumble of the trucks. A son whose bedroom rug is decorated with things that go– airplanes, fire trucks, cars, trains, and helicopters—and it is the wheel, that black round object, to which he points and drools.

In honor of boys and things that go, here are a handful of new books that celebrate the wheel.

Picture Books

Trains Go

By Steve Light

Steve Light, the author and illustrator of Trains Go knows the allure of trains. It’s not just the rattle and clang or the choo choo or whoosh, it’s the length. How the train just keeps going by, car after car, as if it will never end. Light uses watercolor and black ink and beautifully illustrates trains –freight and diesel and speed and more. When you open the page, the train stretches to two feet. That’s a lot of train!

Ages 1-5 | Publisher: Chronicle Books | January 25, 2012

Train Man

By Andrea Zimmerman and David Clemesha

In Train Man, by Andrea Zimmerman and David Clemesha, we enter the realm of a boy’s imagination as he considers what he’ll be when he grows up. A train man, without a doubt, with a train man hat and overalls. As the story progresses, his toy train turns into a big engine and he is at the helm, traveling up the mountain and back down again, then finally into his room with his track and miniature trains.

Ages 2-5 | Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.| March 13, 2012

Machines Go to Work in the City

By William Low

Since I received this book a couple weeks ago, my son has picked it up probably fifty times. (You’ll see why in a second). William Low’s Machines Go to Work in the City opens with a garbage truck. “Vroooom! Here comes the garbage truck, making its run! When the truck makes its last pickup, are the garbage collectors done for the day?” The page on the left folds out or up or down to give you the answer: “No, they must go to the landfill to empty the trash.” (And then I launch into a discussion of how we want to try to recycle because look at that yucky landfill. Never too early to start, I suppose). That’s the pattern of the book as it moves through commuter trains, vacuum trucks, tower cranes and airplanes. After the umpteenth reading, my son now says very clearly and distinctly the word, “No.”

Ages 2-6 | Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.| June 5, 2012

Everything Goes On Land 

By Brian Biggs

Everything Goes On Land by Brian Biggs illustrates the entire page, using lots of color and capturing the sense of a city with its busyness and packed streets. We move through the city with a little boy and his father, who is driving. They see cars, trucks, RVs, bikes, buses, motorcycles, subway and trains. The book is interspersed with detailed explanations about particular vehicles. We even get to learn about how an electric car works. Biggs has a wonderful sense of the silly, letting the dogs and birds talk. He’s also built in a sort of I Spy game with birds wearing hats and random things that just don’t belong.

Ages 4-8 | Publisher: HarperCollins | September 13, 2011

A Chapter Book

Stealing Air

By Trent Reedy

Trent Reedy in Stealing Air has a keen sense of what might appeal to a young boy– not only things that go, but boys who build rocket bikes and real airplanes in secret sheds.( Yes, a bike that with a flip of a switch zooms down the road.) Brian, a newcomer to Iowa, makes friends with Max, who shares with him his secret—in a hidden shed, he’s building a real airplane that looks like a flying motorcycle. But Max is afraid of heights so he solicits help from Brian and Alex, the popular kid from school, to serve as pilot and co-pilot.  If the plane is ever to get off the ground, the boys have to overcome fights at home, at school, and a bully named Frankie.

Ages 8-12 | Publisher: Scholastic, Inc. | October 1, 2012

Nina Schuyler’s first novel, “The Painting,” was nominated for the Northern California Book Award and was named a ‘Best Book’ by the San Francisco Chronicle. Her next novel, “The Translator,” will be published by Pegasus Books in New York, Spring, 2013. She is the fiction editor for www.ablemuse.com and teaches creative writing at the University of San Francisco. 

Original article: Kids Car Books & Things That Go: Airplanes, Fire Trucks, & Trains. Oh, My!

©2012 The Childrens Book Review. All Rights Reserved.

Trains Go is a new 16 page board book by Steve Light.  It’s a book that helps a child differentiate between the sounds different trains make.  The board book helps readers hear the distinct sounds of a mountain train, a speed train, a steam train, a diesel train, etc.  It reminds readers that not all [...]

Trains Go is a new 16 page board book by Steve Light.  It’s a book that helps a child differentiate between the sounds different trains make.  The board book helps readers hear the distinct sounds of a mountain train, a speed train, a steam train, a diesel train, etc.  It reminds readers that not all [...]