Aaron Becker
ISBN: 9780763660536
Read February 3, 2014
Wordless Picture Book
This is a beautiful book. It ranks up there with Weisner's best. It is a much more textured and evocative furthering of the Harold and the Purple Crayon tale (with perhaps a cameo of a slightly grown Harold at the end?) following a young girl who creates a lush imaginative world from her red crayon. Adventures, perils, rescues, and finally, a friend. Just delightful. I love how the different landscapes evolve into each other seamlessly, but are totally and completely different, each from the next. It really furthers the sense of a daydream or a half-awake dreaming memory, where things make sense in the dream, and only when you wake do you realize how disparate and segregated the segments actually were without your imagination and mental focus holding them together into a pattern and a plot. I love that this creates that same magical feeling without being pretentious or cutesy about it.
Locomotive
Brian Floca
ISBN: 9781416994152
Read February 3, 2014
Read February 3, 2014
Nonfiction Picture Book
Super-dense text packs every page, with sparse sepia-toned artwork grounding the visuals and providing context for the storyline and imparted information. Reminds me very strongly of Fleischman's The Matchbox Diary, but less emotionally impactful (not a bad thing, just a difference in the type of story being conveyed). Love the glut of information on the endpages, and the nifty little details like using the "convenience" on the train only while it's in motion, as it wasn't polite to do your business while the train was stopped at a station because the convenience was simply a hole, and you didn't want to make the station nasty. The multiple fonts and colors and sizes got right up to the line of being overdone, but never stepped over for me, but the verseform did me in a bit. If words are written like lines of poetry, I'm old-school enough to want them either in iambic pentameter, or to rhyme. Nevertheless, that is a small niggle indeed for a beautiful and crammed book of an interesting and exciting part of American history.
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