Tuesday Storytime: Summer Fun

These were selected by my coworker!

An Island in the Sun
Stella Blackstone, illustrated by Nicoletta Ceccoli
A "House that Jack built" narrative structure, and a lovely rhyming flow make this sweet but fairly empty story move along quickly, held largely together by the utterly beautiful illustrations of sun and wind and water and islands in a tropical imagination of a world. Beautiful but slight.

North, South, East, West
Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Greg Pizzoli
An unpublished little gem from Margaret Wise Brown has a little bird fluttering off into different climates as she flies in each cardinal direction to discover where she most wants to be - finally (seemingly) returning home to settle and raise a family who end the story by taking wing in all different directions just like their mother.

Leo Can Swim
Anna McQuinn, illustrated by Ruth Hearson
Leo is Lola's little brother, a Black British child who has family-and-child-centered real-life adventures with his family and father, much as Lola does in her books. In this story, Leo and his dad go to a swim class at a local pool, and encounter locker rooms, swimming gear, a swimming lesson, and a nice rest after class. Perfect little books for explaining life experiences for kids about to start on them personally, or for kids who may never have that experience to learn about them in a realistic way.

Tuesday Storytime: Beach Reads

I was off on vacation this past week, so I had a fellow librarian give my storytime, and I treated everyone to a collection of "beach reads" so they'd all be properly jealous of me.  :)

The Twelve Days of Summer
Elizabeth Lee O'Donnell, illustrated by Karen Lee Schmidt
ISBN: 0688082025
Cartoonish illustrations with vibrant colors and careful plotting to get the numbers all counted in.

Our protagonist character is a cute little girl visiting the beach with her family, and she counts up from "a little purple sea anemone" along with the tune from The Twelve Days of Christmas.  The rhymes are cute, the meter is solid, and the illustrations are adorable.  An excellent silly summer read.


An Island in the Sun
Stella Blackstone, Nicoletta Ceccoli
ISBN: 1841481939
Dreamy fanciful illustrations (think Kinuko-Craft-light) are the star of an "I spy" building rhyme.

Another co-opted rhyme sequence, this one based on the old "I spy with my little eye" format mixed with the "the house that Jack built" cumulative concept.  Despite the cumulative nature, this one is still easily short enough to be the middle book, and to flow quickly and nicely with few tongue-twisters or trip-up meters.


Three By the Sea
Mini Grey
ISBN: 9780375867842
Mini Grey's trademark faux-collage and quirky cartoon detailing.

The "three" of the title are a dog, cat, and mouse, who all live together in a shack by the sea, and have worked out an arrangement of chores and labor that all are happy with - until a slick foxy salesman stops by and insidiously manages to get everyone thinking they do more work, and their housemates are slackers or incompetent.  After a heated argument, things get sorted out (mainly through the ejection of the slick fox) and while things do change, they do so organically, and with goodwill and mutual appreciation.  I'm tempted to give this book to college students in shared housing.  

Just one more regular storytime before our official start of Summer Reading Themes - it was a patchwork mess this year, making it difficult for me to find any extra titles to start at the top of June like I usually try to do.  Oh well - gives me a chance to use some of the beach/summer titles that I rarely get to showcase.

 

Tuesday Storytime: Travel

This week's theme is entirely due to finding Miss Mouse Takes Off in the delivery one day by chance and loving it.

Miss Mouse Takes Off
Jan Ormerod
ISBN: 0688178715

Miss Mouse is a long-armed, long-legged stuffed mouse, and she engagingly narrates her airplane trip to visit Grandma, from check-in through the in-flight movie and back to the ground again.  I love this so much because it's entirely factual, and doesn't over-glamorize or add fantastic or fantasy touches to the trip - it just stands on it's own as a mundane real life adventure.



Rattle and Rap
Susan Stegall
ISBN: 9781845077037

This one is super super short.  Excellent choice for today, because I had a bunch of wiggle-worms.  This might be better as a one-on-one book, because the illustrations are hugely detailed and interesting, but the word-count is so low that I'm not able to linger on them as much as I'd like because I have to keep the story (such as it is) flowing along.  Essentially this is just an onomatopoeic journey on a train ride, from start "Tickets please, tickets please" to stop "End of the line, end of the line" with lots of train noises in between "rattle and rap" and "whistle and whine" and some basic descriptions "hurrying, hurrying, hurtling by" "skimming the sky, skimming the sky."  Notable also for casual inclusion of multi-ethnic, multi-able characters.


Bear on a Bike
Stella Blackstone
Debbie Harter
ISBN: (Board Book) 9781841483757

There is supposed to be a hardcover edition of this, but I wasn't able to find one through our consortium, sadly.  (Hardcover ISBN: 978190122491)  A rhyming book, with paired page-spreads - one with the bear on a form of transport (bike, raft, boat, rocket), the second spread shows where the bear went.  Ends with Bear on a rocket-ship heading out into space.  Very sweet, very short.  The rhymes are easy, but some of them don't scan particularly well for me: "I'm going to the seaside, / Where children love to play, / Where young friends dig and race / And swim, while fishes dart away."  

Overall a nice set of short easy reads for our little ones today.