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: 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.

Childrens Review: Unraveling Rose

Reader copy provided by Edelweiss+ in return for a review.



Unraveling Rose
Brian Wray
Illustrated by Shiloh Penfield

Rating: 4.7/5
Story: 4/5
Characters: 5/5
Illustrations: 5/5

Unraveling Rose is the sweet story of a stuffed bunny who likes everything just perfect who develops a loose thread. Eventually, that loose thread drives her to distraction and eventually to picking at it all the time, pulling out her own stuffing. She decides to make a change, restuffs herself and stitches it up, then through time and patience and practice, learns that not everything has to be perfect. The end of the book includes questions and answers about OCD and resources for parents and teachers.

Rose herself is utterly charming, sympathetic and adorable, as is the boy who snuggles her and reads books with her. The illustrations do an excellent job of portraying Rose's increasing distress over her loose thread and the relief afterwards of finally having a direction to go that may help.

I feel very strongly that more children's material needs to exist to address compassionate ways to recognized and approach mental illness. It's a very personal passion, since I lived most of my life with an anxiety disorder that went undiagnosed until my early 30s. Putting this kind of material into the hands of children, parents, and teachers is so important.

While I acknowledge the lack of material currently circulating, I had some concerns about this title. The author makes direct suggestions of what parents and teachers should do, rather than directing each question to an authority. The author, while very well-informed and certainly well-intentioned, makes it seem easy for a child to make the changes needed to accommodate OCD and anxiety; this is far from the truth. It takes a long time, proper medical and potentially pharmacological interventions and a lot of trial and error. The steps presented can alleviate problems, but will not fix the root of the compulsions and anxiety. Ideally, I would like more emphasis placed on discussing problems and compulsions with a trained professional rather than hinting to parents that they can handle this kind of thing on their own.