This ingenious take on the “opposites” book shows the youngest children that big, little and tiny are all in how you look at things. Using just black, white and a velvety gray, with a bit of red, Boyd’s delightful cut paper compositions juxtapose the large and the small in unexpected ways: a “big meadow” is big because it’s full of small flowers; a “big seal” towers over a “tiny castle” that’s made of sand.
Four vignettes, set in England, South Carolina, Boston and San Diego, show how the creamy dessert called blackberry fool has been made and enjoyed over the centuries. Our reviewer, John Lithgow, called out the book’s “abundant charms.” Blackall’s warm, finely detailed illustrations — done in ink, watercolor and blackberry juice — capture the sweep of history and the constancy of family love.
三、《滑稽的骨头:波萨达和他的亡灵节骷髅》(Funny Bones: Posada and His Day of the Dead Calaveras)
By Duncan Tonatiuh
故事:邓肯·托纳蒂乌(Duncan Tonatiuh)
This biography of the Mexican artist, who popularized calaveras both as a form of political protest and a popular entertainment, integrates Posada’s own prints with Tonatiuh’s winsome, cleverly layered compositions. “Befitting its subject, the book communicates through its visual aesthetic,” Maria Russo wrote. “Tonatiuh’s eye-catching earth-toned digital collages, with occasional blasts of dusky purple or blue, feature people who look like the swoopy, postmodern descendants of Mexican folk figures.”
Leo, a little ghost drawn touchingly by Robinson as an improbably sweet and hopeful-looking crayoned outline, feels unwanted in the house he is haunting. So he moves to the city, where he befriends a girl who thinks he’s strictly imaginary. After Leo thwarts a robbery, his real — that is, ghostly — status is affirmed. Our reviewer, Marjorie Ingall, praised Robinson’s “exciting” art. “I love the palette of ‘Leo,’” she wrote. “Black, white, gray and various shades of moody blue, in a mix of acrylic paint and chunky -construction-paper collage.”
五、《埃菲尔夫人:埃菲尔铁塔的爱情故事》(Madame Eiffel: The Love Story of the Eiffel Tower)
By Alice Brière-Haquet. Illustrated by Csil.
故事:爱丽丝·布希耶-阿各特(Alice Brière-Haquet)。绘图:塞希尔(Csil)
In this imaginative telling of the story behind the Eiffel Tower, the engineer Gustave Eiffel is inspired by his love for his ailing wife, Cathy. With a strict palette of black and white with dabs of light rosy red, Csil’s intricate, lacy pen-and-ink illustrations convey Eiffel’s keen attention to detail, along with the allure of Paris and the high-flying ambition of his tower. The effect is romantic and utterly charming, inviting you to look and look at the pages.
A small child is left alone all day to fend for herself. She dozes off on a city bus and wakes in an unknown forest, a silvery fantasyland up in the clouds where she bonds with a flying deer, enormous whales and a seal pup. Our reviewer, Samantha Hunt, was enchanted by this “dreamy, wordless debut,” lovingly illustrated with smoky, mystical-looking pencil drawings. “The dark current flowing underneath such lush imagery,” Hunt wrote, “is the loneliness of childhood under China’s one-child policy.”
“Something to treasure,” our reviewer, Carmela Ciuraru, called this dazzlingwordless book. As a girl and her father walk home through city streets, she notices flowers sprouting in unexpected places. She picks them, accumulating a bouquet that she distributes to a dog, a dead bird, a homeless man and finally, back home, her sleeping toddler sibling. In Smith’s elegant and moving drawings, as Ciuraru wrote, “the only pop of color on the first page is the girl’s bright red hoodie, redolent of Peter’s snowsuit in Ezra Jack Keats’s ‘The Snowy Day.’ More color suffuses these pages as the pair gets closer to home.”
评审员卡尔梅拉·丘拉鲁(Carmela Ciuraru)对这本令人惊叹的绘本的评价是“值得珍藏”。一个小女孩和父亲穿过城市的街道步行回家。她发现,一些意想不到的地方长出了鲜花。她把献花 采来做成花束,分给了一条狗、一只死鸟、一个流浪汉和家里已经睡着了的弟弟。正如丘拉鲁所写的那样,史密斯的插图简洁感人,“第一页上唯一的色彩是小女孩 鲜红的连帽衫,让人想起了埃兹拉·杰克·济慈(Ezra Jack Keats)《雪天》(The Snowy Day)里彼得穿的风雪服。随着两人离家越来越近,书页上的颜色越来越丰富。”
26 pp. Groundwood Books/House of Anansi Press. $16.95. (Picture book; ages 3 to 8)
共26页。格朗伍德/阿南西出版公司(Groundwood Books/House of Anansi Press)。16.95美元。
(绘本,适合3至8岁)
九、《想当国王的老虎》(The Tiger Who Would Be King)
By James Thurber. Illustrated by JooHee Yoon.
故事:詹姆斯·瑟伯(James Thurber) 绘图:尹珠熙(JooHee Yoon,音)
Thurber’s 1956 comic fable about a power-mad tiger who starts a deadly war is vibrantly illustrated by Yoon in a dense, blocky print style, all in an electric red, a cool blue-green, black and white. Each page teems with evocative images of animal life. The effect is ferocious and ravishing, capturing the beastliness of war along with emotions that include pride, boredom, shock and sorrow.
十、《特里基·维克:一个卖埃菲尔铁塔的人的真实故事》(Tricky Vic: The Impossibly True Story of the Man Who Sold the Eiffel Tower)
By Greg Pizzoli
故事:格雷格·皮佐利(Greg Pizzoli)
This biography of the legendary con man who once managed to sell the Eiffel Tower bursts with cheeky wit and verve. We follow Tricky Vic, as he was known, from his birth as Robert Miller in what is now the Czech Republic to his death in a federal prison in Missouri. In one of many comic touches, a thumbprint stands in for Tricky Vic’s head. “Pizzoli’s jocular, simple but graphically sophisticated collage illustrations draw readers even further into a story it would be hard to be bored by,” Maria Russo wrote.