And the moral of this story is to leave well enough alone

            When we think of the great philosophers of Ancient Greece, we think of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle. Those great men have come down through the generations, but there is another man known in posterity whose stories were not meant for the elite class, but for the common folk.  Aesop’s Fables are morality tales that were passed down orally for centuries until they were eventually written down.  Aesop is rumored to have been a slave in either Greece or Ethiopia in the 6^th or 5^th century BCE.  Somehow he gained his freedom and created these folktales that served as guides to moral living.  It is likely that Aesop was real in the same sense that Homer was real, and that these stories have been altered and added to over the centuries.  Aesop’s Fables have been reprinted, re-imagined, redrawn, and posted all over the internet.  So why did John Cech do a retelling of the classics that is simplye entitled Aesop’s Fables?  I’ll let you know when I figure it out.

            If you are going to reinvent the wheel, at least put some new rims on it.  I feel that John Cech really added nothing new to these stories.  The premise of the book is simple—one blurb and one picture on one page for each fable—but it fails on the execution.  Each story has a one-sentence moral written underneath it.  I have read much better versions of these stories.  I have loved the story of the mouse and the lion since I was a child.  That story must be one of my earliest memories of reading, and this version did nothing to add to that memory.  I remember learning “Le Cigale et la fourmi” (The Ant and the Grasshopper) in French.  The story was about hunger and desperation and the need to prepare.  Cech gives the story an almost literal meaning when the moral states that “If you don’t work in the summer, you’ll go hungry in the winter.”  These morals are so much more than literal meanings.  In the story of “The Bundle of Sticks,” where a man’s sons could not break the bundle as one, but could each break an individual stick, the moral is “Work together and you’ll be stronger.”  Yes, this gets the message across, but I get no feeling from it.  All of his morals and all of his fables fall flat in the face of all the wonderful versions that have already been done.

            The only discernable reason I can manage to find to read John Cech’s Aesop’s Fables is the illustrations by Martin Jarrie—but even those are not for everyone.  The illustrations try to capture the essence of each story in one picture.  The perspective is all wrong, the characters are in twisted perspective reminiscent of Egyptian pyramid paintings, and I think the bird catcher on page 27 has a broken neck.  Despite all this, there is something quite endearing about the pictures.  I think that the facial expressions on both the animals and the humans may scare younger children, but I love the bright colors and the way the pictures have a sense of texture despite being completely flat.  I also like that the author used a great deal of diversity in the illustrations; there is not just one or two different ethnicities, but a whole host of colors gracing the pages.  Martin Jarrie has a blog called “Drawn!” that is currently down right now, but he promises it will be back up soon and urges you to follow him on Twitter until it is back up.

            I do not think I would use this book when I teach about Aesop’s Fables to my students.  The only time I would actually use this book would probably be in the fourth or fifth grade if I wanted students to compare different interpretations.  I could group students and give all of them the same story, but written by a different author and pictures by a different illustrator.  Then all the students could write the things they liked and did not like about the book.  I think it would be a great way to encourage students to become critical thinkers about different texts. 
            If this book were some story that was Cech’s own invention, I may not be so harsh on it: but Cech chose to take something that many hold dear and try to add to it.  If it is not broke, John Cech (and it isn’t), do not try to fix it.

I will admit, when I was a kid I used to dream of going to Chewandswallow. How amazing would it be to live in a place where it rained orange juice and stormed pancakes? Almost every person knows the beloved Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, written by Judi Barrett and drawn by Ron Barrett. But how many people know that there is a sequel? The sequel, entitled Pickles to Pittsburg, was published 19 years after Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs was published in 1978, but it still holds the essence of the original. As a child, the original held a place of magic in my mind. As an adult, the sequel provides me with a chance to see just what happened to the place that, in my mind, had simply turned into a garbage dump full of rotting food.


In the sequel, little time has passed in the real world—Henry and Kate are still the same age, and grandpa is still able to go vacationing around the world. In the opening, Henry and Kate are making oversized meatballs for their mother and baking a “welcome home” cake for their grandfather. As Kate falls asleep staring at the postcard her grandfather sent, she drifts away to an island that “from the air…looks like a gigantic feast. Immense vegetables, salads, and desserts lie beneath us. The mountains look like huge loaves of bread.” As they begin to explore this magical land full of food, they realize that the island seems to be abandoned by humans. There are birds nesting in shredded wheat biscuits and raccoons picking out pasta letters from a river of soup. Eventually, however, they begin to notice signs of human inhabitation. Henry and Kate see orange cartons with funnels waiting to be filled, a town in the distance, and then a giant tuna sandwich being airlifted by a helicopter.

When Henry and Kate go to the town, they find that it is an abandoned town called Chewandswallow. Kate remarks that “Somehow, I know I’ve heard that name somewhere before.” (This is the point in the book where I stopped silently wishing “Oh please let it be Chewandswallow, oh please let it be Chewandswallow” and breathed a sigh of relief.) The children encounter workers who are lifting giant potatoes with fork-lifts (they really are giant forks lifting), as well as artichokes, eggplants, and veal cutlets. The children talk to one of the workers who tell them the story of Chewandswallow, essentially recapping what happened in the original book. He then elaborates by telling Henry and Kate that the inhabitants came back years later and found an endless food supply, so they created the Falling Food Company that makes daily shipments of food to every part of the world. In the end, of course the children go back to reality, but the reader is still left in the wonderful dream that Barrett has created.

The illustrations match up perfectly with the original. In the “real world,” the illustrations are black and white, while the “dream world” illustrations are in color (think “The Wizard of Oz”). The illustrations are no longer of the food getting larger and large, but of a world where large food is assumed and people take full advantage of it. I particularly love the milk pool made from melting ice cream cones and ice cream bars. I love seeing the characters I have read about return to me, and that is why having this sequel written and having it drawn by the same illustrator make this book so special to me.

I believe that this picture book is perfect as a read-aloud for all elementary-school children. Younger children can be read the book after they have already read Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. I suspect that older students have already ready the original and would be just as eager as I was to find out that there is a sequel. As an independent read, it may be too difficult for younger elementary students, as the text is relatively small and there are multiple sentences on each page. Since the text is so small, the illustrations are definitely what captures the reader’s attention.



In the end, however, I beseech you oh multi-millionaires who control the world, please build a Chewandswallow amusement park. I already have ideas for stale-bread water rides and roller coasters that are forced to avoid flying macaroni and chicken. Call me.

In every family, we all know who is really the boss

The Boss Baby by Marla Frazee is a book about a baby who is, as you can probably guess, the boss of the household. The genius in this book is that the baby does nothing other than what a normal baby does. It all begins with “the moment the baby arrived.” He immediately puts his employees, his parents, on a non-stop schedule which does not allot for any sick days or vacations. Like any good businessman, any time that his orders are not obeyed, he screams and throws a fit. He continuously conducts meetings, whether they are in his crib, the kitchen table, on the changing table, or in the middle of the night. Despite the fact that he cannot utter one intelligible word, his employees continue to get the job done. In the end, when his “usual demands were not getting their usual results,” he is forced to change tactics in order to achieve a desirable resolution. According the Frazee, the characters originally including some part-time employees (the neighbors), and one scene where the baby fired the dog. The cast was cut down to just the boss and the parents; hopefully one day Frazee will reveal to us the other pages that almost made it into the book.


This text would not be able to function without the illustrations Marla Frazee draws. Honestly, this book had me at the onesie business suit, complete with tie. The illustrations give life to the text. When the boss talks about the perks of his job, including the “executive gym” and the “private jet” one cannot help but laugh as one sees a different interpretation of these everyday baby toys. The image of his private jet had me close to tears. The boss has all the drinks he wants, day or night, and the accompanying illustration will make adults laugh as the baby holds out an empty bottle and raises his finger for “one more.” Marla Frazee illustrated the book herself, and I love how she explained illustrations in children’s books in an interview she did before the book came out. She says that when children look at illustrations, “no one has to teach them to do it—it’s not like teaching a child to sound out words. They take it in and appreciate it on their own.” Frazee recognizes the importance of the illustrations to a book, something which contributed to her winning two back-to-back Caldecott medals.

I am still a little confused about the intended audience of this book. I know adults will love it, especially ones who have had children and can relate to the demands of their “boss.” I just wonder whether or not children will be able to grasp the subtleties that lay within the text. If a student is an only child, he may not understand any of the references if he has not had any experience with babies. On the other hand, someone who has recently become a big brother or a big sister may understand this book entirely too well. I do believe this is a fun read-aloud, but this is definitely a book where someone needs to know their audience before reading it.

If you loved this book, which I am 100% sure you did, check out some of Marla Frazee’s other award-winning books, including:

• All the World—Written by Liz Garton Scanlon and illustrated by Marla Frazee. Won the Caldecott Award.

• Rollercoaster


• Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever


• Hush Little Baby: A Folk Song With Pictures

Talk a walk across the sky with Mirette

Emily Arnold McCully’s Mirette is my kind of girl. The Caldecott award-winning Mirette on the High Wire is the story of a girl who is resolute and fearless. Set in the late 1800s, Mirette lives with her mother, who owns a boardinghouse in Paris. The boardinghouse always has interesting, lively characters—everything from acrobats to mimes. When a retired high-wire walker named Bellini enters the boardinghouse, this “sad-faced stranger” eventually changes Mirette’s life.

Mirette witnesses Bellini behind the boardinghouse walking on a wire. Her initial reaction was that he was “crossing the courtyard on air!” She watches him every day, but he does not want to teach her, because once someone begins, their “feet are never happy again on the ground.” Mirette, determined to learn how to walk on the high-wire, teaches herself to walk across the length of the wire. After seeing how unwavering Mirette was, Bellini finally teaches Mirette to do stunts on the high-wire. When Mirette finds out that Bellini is a famous high-wire walker, she beseeches him to tell her why he never said anything about it. She finds that he is afraid, and “once you have fear on the wire, it never leaves.” Together, Bellini overcomes his fear and Mirette fulfills her dreams.

The themes in this book are great to discuss with a classroom: Mirette has both determination and fearlessness while Bellini is virtually paralyzed by fear. If a teacher reads this book to a classroom, they could talk about times when they were afraid to do something and how they overcame that fear. I could discuss my fear of heights, and the incredible moment I had when I went parasailing. The classroom could also discuss times when they saw something that made their feet “unhappy on the ground.” Some moment in their life when they knew they had to do something or they would never be satisfied.

When I first read this book, I thought that many words would be beyond their comprehension if they read it alone. There are words like “boardinghouse,” “vagabond,” “leeks,” and “hemp” that I thought they would not know. After reading reviews on the internet, however, I have changed my view slightly. One fourth grade teacher acknowledges that there may be unfamiliar words, but reassures that “McCully always gives plenty of clues for the reader to determine the meaning of these words.” Perhaps in a third or fourth grade classroom this book could be used for independent reading, but I feel that in a first or second grade class it should be used as a read-aloud.

One of the most amazing things about Emily Arnold McCully’s book is that she drew the illustrations herself. The illustrations are watercolors that are somewhat blurry—they remind me of a dream that you cannot quite recall. Each of the illustrations is wrought with emotion. When Bellini told Mirette that she was afraid and could not face his fear, you can understand how sad and lonely Mirette is as she scrubs the floors. The kitchen is large, and the reader is reminded that the fearless Mirette is still just a small girl. The picture of Mirette learning how to do somersaults in the air is amazing; the high-wire is absent from the picture and the reader is allowed to feel Mirette’s feeling of flying through air. The night picture in the end is my favorite, but I do not want to reveal the end, so I will let you discover it for yourself. The final picture seems to suggest a new story with a different girl who has her own dreams and sense of determination.

I bet you never knew a dog could had a froggy smile.

 I bet you never knew that a story about a dog and a frog could touch your heart, but Mo Willem’s City Dog, Country Frog is a compelling story about moving on, diversity and most importantly friendship, that does just that. The city dog moves to the country, and on the first day there “he ran as far and as fast as he could.” Although he could be happy to be out of the city so he can roam around freely without a leash, the author leaves this part slightly ambiguous. There is no mention of his life before this story began, and city dog could have left behind friends that he had known his whole life. Students reading this novel could perhaps relate to having to move away from the city to the country or from the country to the city, leaving behind all their friends for a new life. Whether or not city dog was feeling the strain of moving, this did not last long as he met country frog that very same day.

Country frog and city dog instantly became friends, despite the fact that country frog was already waiting for someone else. Mo Willem takes the book by seasons, and through the seasons country frog teaches city dog country frog games such as “jumping and splashing and croaking.” When it was city dog’s turn to teach games to country frog, they naturally played games such as “sniffing and fetching and barking.” Of all the games that city dog and country frog play, I think my favorite are the “remember-ing games.”

There is an underlying message about diversity in the text that is fairly subtle. He introduces characters that are completely different in every way. He does not present the city dog as a haughty New Yorker with an accent and an attitude, and the country frog is not a hillbilly with a piece of straw sticking out of his mouth. Instead, he presents these animals as similar creatures. I feel that this is important because it shows that no matter where we are from, we can find common ground and learn from one another. I love that Willems refuses to use any stereotypes in this book and instead takes two completely different worlds and gives them a common ground.

The watercolors in this text by Jon Muth are funny and sad, bright and dark—all at the appropriate moments. According to Mo Willems, the illustrations almost did not happen. In a Booklist feature by Ilene Cooper, Willems revealed that, although he tried to draw the illustrations, none of the pictures he drew could capture the essence of the book like he wanted. One day, he was dreaming he could draw like Jon Muth, and decided he would instead just ask Jon Muth to draw the illustrations. Jon Muth considered the job for a long time, and it was not until a frog sat on his front porch one night and refused to move that he knew he had to draw the illustrations.

When Willems first dreamed of this book, it was because he had bought a cottage in Connecticut; everything was completely different from his city life. Willems states that he was “surprised by how different it was, how much the texture and the color of the land changed, even from weekend to weekend.” In the watercolors, Muth is able to capture the differences that inspired Willem as he switched the landscape between each season. In addition to embodying Willems’ landscape, Willems claims that Muth also made the dog look exactly like his own city dog. My favorite picture in this book, however, has to be of the dog smiling like a frog. Even in your sadness, you have to smile too.

This book is appropriate for all lower elementary school children. This would be a wonderful read aloud book, and the pictures would certainly garner a laugh or an “oh no” from the students. As an independent read, this book could also be useful. The text is sparse and succinct, and the student will come to expect the text on one side and the pictures on the other as they repeat on almost every page. I wonder about the usefulness of this story to read at bedtime, however: I know that I, for one, would lay awake afterwards pondering the characters, the story, and the pictures Muth so wonderfully drew in City Dog, Country Frog.

Mo Willems keeps a blog that can be found here.

Mo Willems readily admits that this book is a departure from his normal writing. Here is a list of some of his children’s books:

• Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale

• Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity

• The Pigeon Finds a Hotdog!

• Knuffle Bunny Free: An Unexpected Diversion (On sale October 1, 2010)

• Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!

• There is a Bird on You Head!

Shhhhhh! It's "The Quiet Book"

Our lives are too often defined by what we say and how we act: how often do we stop and think of the quiet that permeates our lives? Deborah Underwood’s The Quiet Book forces the reader to stop and think of the quiet times. Jennifer Price, writing for Asheville Citizen-Times states that the “world is a loud, busy place, and it is growing louder and busier every day…and yet there is quiet to be had.” Underwood takes a departure from her typical nonfiction stories to bring to light this fantastic children’s story.

The story has no narrative besides beginning in the morning and ending at night, but instead the pages are stand-alone reminders of the best quiet moments in everyone’s life. My favorites include “First one awake quiet” that features a stuffed rabbit stretching, and “First snowfall quiet.” Who doesn’t relish in a quiet house when they are the first to awake in a normally bustling household? Especially here in Virginia where snow is such a rarity, who can do anything but stop and stay quiet when the first snowflakes begin falling from the sky? This book could be read aloud to class before some quiet activities, or perhaps to a preschool group before a naptime. Essentially, however, this book rivals Goodnight, Moon for the perfect bedtime story. Everything about the novel speaks of peacefulness, from the lack of any direct speech to the muted colors that paint the pages.

The illustrations done by Renata Liwska are able to take the text to a whole new level; all characters in the book are stuffed animals that, by nature, spend their entire lives quiet. From the cover that reads nothing other than The Quiet Book as all stuffed animals press their fingers to their lips to remind the reader to enter quietly, to the end page that will surely receive a smile, Liwska could not have been a better choice. The book is mainly colored in muted blues, browns, and greens that whisper “shhhh” to the reader; not bright colors or shocking illustrations are to be found in this book.. The illustrations are simple yet meaningful, evoking a smile and emotions as the reader empathizes with these silent animals. Pictures of Liwka’s sketches, both those that are seen in the book and those that were sadly left out, can be found on Amazon’s The Quiet Book page. After reading the book, perhaps readers will stop and think about their own favorite quiet times. Right now, I’m going to go enjoy my “moment at the end of a good book quiet.”