Lane Smith’s Abe Lincoln’s Dream invites us, with America’s 16th president, to travel through dreams and corny jokes, and to consider the state of the nation. In a tone that falls between the humor of his John, Paul, George and Ben (2006) and the reflective mood of the Caldecott-Honor Grandpa Green (2011), Smith’s latest picture
Bumble-Ardy gets adopted by his Aunt Adeline after his “immediate family gorged and gained weight. / And got ate.” When he throws himself a birthday party without her permission, Aunt Adeline threatens his guests: “Scat, get lost, vamoose, just scram! / Or else I’ll slice you into ham!” On the next two-page spread, Bumble tells
The capacity to surprise is a sign of a true artist. Though famous for his visual and verbal wit, Lane Smith has written a gentle, moving book about growing old. Grandpa Green has humor, but it relegates its sole joke to a footnote. (After reporting that in fourth grade, Grandpa Green “got chicken pox,” Smith
The problem with a blurb from Neil Gaiman on a cover is that, invoking Gaiman, it inevitably diminishes the book by comparison. This is not the book’s fault. Gaiman is one of our most gifted contemporary writers. Catherynne M. Valente may not be, but I wouldn’t even be thinking about the comparison if Gaiman’s endorsement
His first non-fiction work, Queen of the Falls (2011) is also one of Chris Van Allsburg’s best. Indeed, in some ways it marks a return to form. After writing and illustrating a picture book each year for about 15 years, Van Allsburg stopped producing picture books for a while. Following Bad Day at Riverbend (1995),
What makes an award-winner?  One of the best picture books of 2008, Kadir Nelson’s We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball (2008) won neither the Caldecott Medal nor a Caldecott Honor. The following year, Jerry Pinkney became the first African American to win the Caldecott Medal – “given to the artist of the
War is hell.  If General Sherman (and, I expect, many others) hadn’t said it first, I suspect Suzanne Collins might have chosen those three words as a subtitle for her Hunger Games trilogy.  As its predecessors did, Mockingjay dramatizes the physical and emotional consequences of war.  It’s especially adept at displaying the scars invisible to those of