A Good Night Walk
By Elisha Cooper
Orchard/Scholastic, $16.99
Ages 3-6 years
How might the world look to a child? “A Good Night Walk” takes place “before it’s time for bed,” down to the end of the street and back. Remember when your world was only that large? The familiar geography is quietly commented on by the parent, house by house. Families are moving through chores, squirrels play in the trees, a late mail delivery arrives. The houses are not all the same, but each conveys the promise of a special space within. (If Elisha Cooper were selling real estate, I’d buy.) Behind the houses (which seem sited along a ridge overlooking a bay), Cooper moves the sky through its changing palette of blue, street lights go on and, in a phrase that sums up the slow peacefulness of the book, “The birds are calm.” This book is “Goodnight Moon” in a neighborhood setting. Certainly calms me down.
Caramba
By Marie-Louise Gay
Groundwood, $16.95
Ages 4-6 years
The Baby on the Way
By Karen English, pictures by Sean Qualls
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $16
Ages 4-8 years
Just after sunset, on a rooftop garden, Jamal “looked up at Grandma hard.” ” ‘Were you a baby, too?’ ” he asks. What’s delightful is that the story never has to make explicit that Jamal and his grandmother are waiting for his new sibling. His anxieties about his place in the family are effortlessly handled by Grandma’s tale of her own birth as her mother’s 10th child. Sean Qualls’ expressionistic drawings convey in their recurring palette–greys, browns, blues and mauves–a calm and loving world from generation to generation.
And for those not-so-calm members found in every generation there’s “Caramba,” by Marie-Louise Gay. Other cats can fly. Why not Caramba? He has, of course, another secret skill.
Walter Was Worried
By Laura Vaccaro Seeger
Neal Porter/Roaring Brook, $15.95
Ages 8-10 years
Not for tiny readers but for ones willing to work out the visual clues in each picture, as a backdrop storm rolls in and out.
Walter: The Story of a Rat
By Barbara Wersba, drawings by Donna Diamond
Front Street, $16.95
Ages 8 and older
Walter knows how to read (“For reasons he could not explain”) and he lives in the house of an elderly, reclusive writer of children’s books, Miss Amanda Pomeroy. Any child old enough to sit still knows there’s another story here, especially as Miss Pomeroy writes a series about a successful supermouse. Barbara Wersba doesn’t tie up all the loose ends here, leaving more to the imagination of her audience. In passing, there’s quite a thoughtful review of rodent classics in children’s literature.
Jazz A-B-Z
By Wynton Marsalis, illustrated by Paul Rogers
Candlewick, $24.99
Ages 12 and older
This is meant to introduce its readers to jazz greats, not alphabet letters. “O,” for example, is sax player Ornette Coleman, and the text is a riff on words beginning with and otherwise containing “O,” dense, deep and best read with the sounds of Coleman in your ears (a specific record for each artist is recommended at book’s end). There’s also substantial biographical and definitional material at the back. This isn’t a book so much as a course in jazz history, to be explored slowly. It may look like a picture book, but it’s actually a thoughtful guide for young adults (and their adults).
