Open This Little Book and Find a Reading Rainbow

My friend Dan shares my love of great picture books, so when he finds one, he always makes a point of alerting me. This year for Christmas, he gave me Open This Little Book, a simple but clever book written by Jesse Klausmeier and illustrated by Suzy Lee.

The first thing I thought of when I read through this fun book was Cloud Atlas, as it has a similar recursive structure, albeit with much simpler contents. Indeed, there is very little text in the book except at its very heart. Nonetheless, there is enough there to give kids the gist of the idea and hopefully inspire not only further reading but further writing as well.

While Klausmeier is a first-time author, Korean artist Lee has received many accolades for her work, and it is the visual component of this book that is so striking. It begins after the title page, when we see a purple paperback book resting comfortably inside the larger hardcover. This interior book is slightly smaller, leaving a mostly-white border around it where the book returns to full-size at the end. Its cover is less complex but still incorporates most of the same elements as the cover proper.

The title is an instruction. Open the book, and you’ll find another, still smaller, book inside, this one entitled Little Red Book. Inside that is Little Green Book, which contains Little Orange Book, which houses Little Yellow Book, which conceals Little Blue Book and, finally, Little Rainbow Book. Each book introduces another character, and the two illustrations inside it show that character holding the next book in line. For instance, Rabbit, who first appears in the orange book, holds the yellow book in his paw.

The use of color in the book is wonderful. Each book has a solid color outline on the inside to which the next book reaches, so when you get to the middle you have very defined white, purple, red, green, orange, yellow and blue boxes. While the order is not quite that of the rainbow spectrum, the basic colors are there, and it’s very pleasing to the eye.

Additionally, the color subtly enforces the idea that every book we read expands our knowledge. The first illustration inside the purple book is black and white except for the red book. In the next illustration, however, red is used extensively, while the only other color is green, which is only used to show the book Ladybug is reading. This continues, with each book incorporating more colors.

When they double back on themselves, each of them closing his or her book in turn, the illustrations on the right-hand side of the books are drenched with color. Rabbit now has a yellow umbrella; Ladybug is surrounded by leafy greenery. Their worlds are brighter because of what they have gained by reading.

That message is more overtly stated at the very end of the book as well, since it explicitly instructs children to open another book after they have closed the last of the mini-books. The final illustration is a joyous celebration of the wonders of reading, with all of the book’s characters and many others happily sprawled around a beautiful bookcase fashioned out of a pair of entwined trees. That design emphasizes the sense of connection that runs through the book (or, rather, series of books). Stories are something we share with each other.

This book is a delight to peruse, and I can easily picture some children wanting to try creating a book like this themselves. I’m certain my artistic brother would have enjoyed such a task had he encountered such a book as a kid. Children might also have fun identifying all of the animals featured in the final picture and imagining what each of them could be reading.

As someone who grew up with both Star Trek: The Next Generation and Reading Rainbow, I was intrigued by Klausmeier’s decision to dedicate the book in part to LeVar Burton. She offers no explanation, but I suspect the latter show has something to do with it. After all, she, too, is telling reader to take a look in a book, and in this case, the contents are colorful indeed.

Christian Bale Suits Up for the First Time in Batman Begins

When The Dark Knight came out in 2008, one of the reasons I was interested in it despite the violence the trailers portended was that I’d seen part of Batman Begins and liked it. This month, I watched the first movie in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy and realized just how little of it I’d actually seen. Nonetheless, I did find it an enjoyable movie, much more so than the second.

Batman Begins is like The Dark Knight Rises in that it spends a lot of time getting into the head of Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale). While the focus of The Dark Knight is a bit different, these two movies make natural bookends. We see several flashbacks to Bruce’s childhood, during which he is tormented with anxiety over the bats that live in a cave on the grounds of Wayne Manor. This terror ultimately has deadly consequences, leading him to revisit it as an adult and use it to face more monstrous villains, including an unlikely but terrifying foe who preys on people’s deepest fears.

Batman is a dark superhero forged through tragedy, and we see a lot of that brooding angst here. However, we also see the strength of his moral principles, which were instilled in him by his parents. While he struggles with a desire for revenge, his refusal to become a bloodthirsty vigilante plays an important role in his development, particularly in regard to Ducard (Liam Neeson), the martial arts master from whom he receives extensive training during a lengthy absence from Gotham City.

The movie is very action-packed, with numerous explosions and altercations, but it also has quieter moments and bits of humor sprinkled throughout as welcome seasoning. Michael Caine is magnificent as his faithful butler Alfred, a father figure and devoted friend with a wry sense of humor, and Morgan Freeman is similarly enjoyable as inventor Lucius Fox, who provides Batman with all of his nifty gadgets. Meanwhile, Gary Oldman brings dignity and warmth to the role of kindhearted Jim Gordon, one of the few cops in Gotham City who is truly concerned about justice.

The screenplay by Nolan and David S. Goyer does a great job of establishing the complexities of Bruce’s motivation and the darkness of the city he aims to protect. The scenes in his childhood and early adulthood are particularly effective at making him sympathetic despite his aloof manner and tendency toward darkness. As childhood pal Rachel Dawes, Katie Holmes helps drive home the distinction between his noble aims and his sometimes excessive methods.

While I’m much more of a Superman fan, Nolan and these talented actors are very effective in bringing a unique vision of this iconic character to the big screen.

The Homecoming Introduces the Waltons to the World

Growing up, I watched The Waltons occasionally, though never enough to feel a deep sense of familiarity with the characters. Still, I found the homespun charm of the show endearing and was intrigued when my boyfriend Will suggested watching The Homecoming, the movie that started it all.

The television movie features the same cast of children as the series, along with the same grandma. The most noticeable cast difference is that Olivia Walton, the mother of the large family, is played by Patricia Neal. Aside from John-Boy, who is portrayed by gangly, lovable Richard Thomas, Olivia is the character given the most attention as she struggles to mask her anxiety over her husband’s late return from an out-of-town job on Christmas Eve.

Like many Christmas movies, this is a heartwarming tale of family togetherness. The hardscrabble setting of a farm during the Depression makes the economy a major source of conflict. These are good salt-of-the-earth people who must work tirelessly and support each other in order to survive. While the driving concern in the film is why John is late and whether he is all right, it also deals with the children’s individual fears and frustrations, particularly John-Boy’s desire to strike out on his own and become a writer and Mary-Ellen’s (Judy Norton) teen angst.

The heart of the special is in the family, particularly the close-knit but chaotic ensemble of the seven children. While the Waltons are simple people trying to scrape out a living, they still have hopes and dreams, and the children have plenty of silliness in them. Kami Cotler is particularly adorable as the tiny Elizabeth, whose innocent remarks rarely fail to elicit laughter.

The movie also deals with various other members of the community, the most colorful of which are the mildly batty Baldwin sisters Mamie (Josephine Hutchinson) and Emily (Dorothy Stickney), elderly spinsters who sustain themselves by selling their father’s famous bootleg whiskey. One of the best scenes in the movie involves John-Boy and vivacious preacher Hawthorne Dooley (Cleavon Little) attempting to coax a favor out of these feisty ladies. Hawthorne, incidentally, is strikingly contrasted with a sanctimonious missionary whose attempt to minister to the local children is both comical and nightmarish.

Anyone who enjoyed The Waltons should have a look at this movie that launched the series, even if it is a bit odd to see some of the familiar characters played by different actors. The spirit of the series is certainly present in this tale of individuals in hard times doing what they must to make it and helping each other to do the same. Based on the author’s own childhood experience, this wholesome yarn is ideal for cozy Christmastime viewing.

Santa Finds Some Unexpected Helpers in Oh, What a Christmas!

In Jerry Pallotta’s Who Will Guide My Sleigh Tonight? Santa runs through all sorts of trials with different animals before settling on the perfect creatures to pull his sleigh. In the more recent picture book Oh, What a Christmas!, Michael Garland posits a scenario in which Santa already knows which animals work best but must resort to using different species due to an accident.

Garland is a longtime illustrator, and it is his lavish artwork that drives this silly but sweet tale. The story is told with simple narration in a couple of paragraphs per page. Particularly noteworthy phrases like “BIG, FAT, JOLLY RED SKYROCKET” and onomatopoeia like “THUD! STOMP! THWACK!” jump out at the reader in extra-large print and capital letters. Santa speaks from time to time, usually peppering his dialogue with “ho”s, but the reindeer are silent, as are the animals that come into the story soon afterward.

The book consists mostly of full-page illustrations and two-page spreads filled with vibrant colors and intricate shading. The tale begins with Santa and his reindeer embarking on their Christmas Eve ride, only to have a straightforward night thwarted when the harness breaks, causing the deer to be separated from Santa and the sleigh to crash. Santa lands near a barn, and it is there that he finds his replacements: two sheep, two cows, a horse, a pig, a goat and a hound dog. The main fun of the story is seeing these ordinary animals in the extraordinary situation of guiding Santa’s sleigh.

The animals have a fairly realistic look to them while still being slightly cartoonish, particularly in their eyes, which are large and white with small black pupils, each with a pinprick of light in it. Santa, too, has such eyes, along with rosy cheeks and a bulbous nose. His beard and mustache are silky white, and his suit looks quite cozy. Santa is very jolly-looking, while the animals spend much of their time looking gently confused. Some of the facial expressions are quite comical.

As stories go, this one isn’t too complicated, but it is sweet, since it allows a ragtag team of farm animals to do something amazing and to help Santa out of a jam. There’s a general sense of goodwill about the tale and a warm glow in several of the illustrations that would feel at home in a Thomas Kinkade painting. For young children who enjoy animals, this book offers a fun twist on a Christmas tradition.

A Bad Kitty Christmas Is a Good Christmas Book

I imagine that most cat owners have entertained the thought that they have a bad kitty. After all, cats have an independent attitude and a knack for getting into mischief, and the holidays often bring out the worst in them since there are so many opportunities to cause trouble. That is certainly the case in Nick Bruel’s A Bad Kitty Christmas, one of several books featuring a scraggly black car with a tuft of white fur on her chest and a sometimes-surly disposition.

This charming story is told through rhyme. It begins and ends as a parody of A Visit From St. Nicholas, but it’s a much longer narrative than that classic poem, and Santa Claus isn’t involved at all. Instead, this is the story of a mischievous kitty who makes a colossal mess, gets soundly scolded and decides to run away en route to the big family dinner. Along the way, she comes to realize how nice it is to have a home, even if people can be frustrating sometimes.

One very neat thing about this book is that it is an alphabet book, but instead of going through the alphabet once, as most books of that type do, it does so several times, and it is integrated organically into the story. The first time around, we get an alphabetical list of all the damage Kitty has done to the house, with one noun and one passive past tense verb in each short sentence. Each time the sentence’s star letter is used at the beginning of a word, it is in red and extra-large.

The second time, the featured letter is blue, and instead of a sentence per letter, it’s only a word or phrase, so this alphabet only takes up two pages. It lists all of the animals the ravenous Kitty wants to eat, and some of them are quite unusual, so there is an educational element to this one beyond the alphabet as children can learn about such creatures as cormorants, ibises, narwhals and quetzals. The two-page spread also features six amusing illustrations grouping the animals, so kids can have an instant idea of what they look like.

Finally, the third alphabet is a listing of various people appearing in photographs hanging on the Christmas tree of an elderly woman who finds Kitty after she runs away. While the first alphabet is funny and the second is educational, this third is poignant as it shows all of the people important in the woman’s life and helps Kitty to understand how much these bonds matter. There are also interesting little tidbits in there, such as the fact that “vriend” is the Afrikaans word for “friend.”

Another fun element of this book is the fact that shortly after Kitty runs away, the pup who lives with her also hops out of the car in order to conduct a search. After that point, many of the pages have a black-and-white inset showing how he is progressing on his journey as he sniffs her trail out and makes inquiries of any creature he sees. The main illustrations, by contrast, are vibrantly colored and sometimes presented in several panels per page. This is a very busy book, filled with a bustle of activity and sometimes several things happening at once. It’s also ultimately a very sweet book with a heartwarming conclusion that is likely to elicit as many smiles among parents as children.