Picture Book Review: Penny and the Plain Piece of Paper

Penny and the Plain Piece of Paper 

Miri Leshem-Pelly

Overall Rating: 4/5 <- genuine average
Plot: 4/5
Characters: 4/5
Writing: 4/5

Summary: Penny, a colorful scribble of a little girl, is bored on her plain, white piece of paper, so she strikes out to visit other kinds of paper. She visits a newspaper, a map, graph paper, wrapping paper and a coloring book before returning to her original home, dissatisfied with the restrictive rules each other paper has. She decides instead to be herself on her plain paper and invite everyone she met on her journey to make a world of their own rules with her.

Impression: The illustrations are adorable, simple and fresh. Penny is unique in her world and each different paper world has its own stylistic look. You know Compass is from the Map because his lines and shapes are the same. Knowing the bears are from the Coloring Book goes beyond their black outlines and lack of color: they have the same rounded style as the rest of their world. Everyone fits where they start and show themselves to be clearly different from Penny.

Conclusion/Recommendations: Penny's story is cute, fun and flexible. An excellent story for early readers and story-times.

Children's Review: My Brigadista Year

My Brigadista Year
by Katherine Paterson

Final Rating: 4.5/5
Plot: 4/5
Characters: 5/5
Writing: 5/5

Newbery Award-winning author Katherine Paterson presents a historical fiction story from a bright young Cuban girl who volunteers to take part in the Cuban literacy campaign of 1961. Lora leaves her comfortable home in Havana to trek deep into the mountains to teach the compesinos, the farmers living in the countryside, to read and write. She tells the reader about her year as a brigadista, one of those teachers who strived to teach and learn beside their students until Cuba could be declared by the United Nations in 1962 as an illiteracy-free country.

Through Lora's eyes, Paterson finds the voice of a young girl in an entirely different country, who sees race and social standing from a Cuban perspective. Her passion for literacy brings Lora into conflict with her family and her father refuses to allow her to sign up for the program until her grandmother convinces him how important it is.

Included at the end is Lora's epilogue, telling the reader where she went, where those families went, how their lives have changed. Her story is almost a call to action, describing the doctors fighting Ebola in Africa and reminding the reader that she wasn't and never has been a hero, but she still made a difference in those people's. How could she not go?

This book should be in every library. If Katherine Paterson isn't nominated for an award this year, I will eat something one would not normally eat (I don't have any hats). The story is powerful, the characters are memorable, and the message stands loud and proud: we can overcome fear and ignorance to be better people together than we were before. Read it. Read it to your friends. Share it with people on the street. It's worth it.

Children's Review: Not a Box

Not a Box
Antoinette Portis

Rating: 5/5
Plot: 5/5
Characters: 5/5
Writing: 5/5
Illustrations: 5/5

I have forever been in love with this book. Not a Box details the inner lives of millions of imaginative children who can go on adventures with little flash and just the assistance of a box and a garden hose. The story is simple, the writing clean and unadorned. The images are the truth of the story, showing first the main character's physical reality with the box and followed by a red-sketched version of the same image only improved by the character's imagination.

One of the joys of this book for me is that the main character is entirely without gender. This story is designed to appeal to girls or boys or kids who haven't figured it out yet. Being a rabbit, the main character is also without human ethnicity and the simple style of storytelling transports any child into the not-a-box of this character. This is also an excellent choice for read-aloud storytimes, as the limited story and bold strokes of the illustration are very easy for children to grasp and expand on. Highly recommended for anyone who ever went to the moon in a box.

Childrens Review: Chickens to the Rescue

Chickens to the Rescue
John Himmelman

Rating: 5/5
Plot: 5/5
Characters: 5/5
Writing: 5/5

Chickens to the Rescue is one of my favorite childrens' books of all time. I am eternally disappointed that this book wasn't around when I was a kid. It follows the adventures of the family that live on the Greenstalk farm. As the story progresses, each member of the family has a puzzle they can't figure out and then the next page is always a two-page spread of a wild conglomeration of chickens solving the humans' problems.

Each page is full of life and activity and the chicken pages are the sort of hunt-and-find images that remind me of Steven Kellog's illustrations for Meg Karper's Jimmy's Boa books. There are dozens of things happening on every page and there is such delight in finding the weird things this or that chicken might be doing just on the edge of a page.

The story itself is straightforward and simple as each Greenstalk laments their problem where the chickens can hear them. It really isn't any more complicated than that, with most of the storytelling being supported in the illustrations. Himmelman's chickens are whimsical and wild, mischievous and with their own personalities throughout.

I highly recommend this book and it's sister books, Cows to the Rescue, Pigs to the Rescue, and Duck to the Rescue. Yes, just the one duck. He's a wonder-duck.