A Child of Books
By Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston
This isn’t just a picture book. It’s a work of art! There is so much packed into these few pages. The story is simple. A child of books (real or imagined, we don’t quite know, and it doesn’t really matter) is introducing a boy to her world. I could definitely see this being made into a short film, but the problem with that would be people constantly pausing to read what was on the screen. Even the inside front and back covers are filled with possible journeys to take. (They are filled with book titles and authors in very tiny font. All the better to cram more titles in!) This book is a mixture of photographs (or that super realistic drawing where you can’t tell if it’s real or not) and drawings and handwritten words and text. The text makes up part of the art, and there’s so much that it could take someone, especially a child, hours to read through it all. There are chunks of text from the classics that could draw someone in to jump to the novel. It’s a journey for both parent and child – the child for the handwritten story, and the parent for the introduction to countless classics they can either revisit or experience for the first time. And there are little details as well. The adult reading a newspaper (made up of Very Important Things, which is full of nothing) has his glasses full of numbers instead of words.
It is a lovely story, and I highly suggest at least taking a look at it! 5 stars!
Otto the Book Bear
By Katie Cleminson
This is adorable. Otto is a book bear, or I suppose you could say a bear in a book and almost be correct. Because while he likes it when people read his book, that doesn’t happen all the time, so Otto likes to leave his book and wander about. (We do get book-ception, where we are reading a book about children reading a book. The children are somehow reading the same book we are. Trippy.) But he gets left behind one day (just him, or his entire book? I’m not quite sure about that part) and he goes off in search of a new home. So he wanders the city until he finds a new home exactly where you might guess. Otto meets some new friends in this new place, and all is well.
(Otto and company often run about, but I’m wondering what happens to the mess they leave behind. And Otto likes to practice his writing on a typewriter, but what happens to the things he writes? Does he hide them, or throw them out or something?)
I would consider reading this at storytime, especially if we had a theme of bears. There aren’t too many words on each page, and the pictures are easy to understand. There are lots of details to find on certain pages. 5 stars!