Roar Like A Dandelion: Celebrate the Alphabet

Congrats to the giveaway winner. Becki Kidd! Thanks for stopping by, Becki. I'll be in touch directly to make sure you really can get your hands on this book soon!
Sandy

Patience, please. 
I am steadily reading nominees in my Cybils Awards categories: nonfiction for elementary and for middle grade readers. You can take a look at the amazing titles that are currently stacked by my side as I write this. Narrowing this list down to two eventual "shortlists" is an enormous responsibility, but the reading is fun. If you wonder what I've been thinking as I read, check out some of my recent ratings and reviews on my GOODREADS posts, here.

 I'm not quite ready to launch reviews of nonfiction picture book nominees. I've also been reading some delightful fiction picture books that released recently. That's intentional. I'm reminding myself to focus not only on the high quality content in these nonfiction nominees, but also on the kid-appeal, word play, and general delightfulness of the books. The underlying criteria for every Cybils category are READER APPEAL and LITERARY QUALITY. 

HarperCollins October, 2019

Those two traits are embodied in an October release, an alphabet picture book that makes me smile from cover to cover: ROAR LIKE A DANDELION, with words by RUTH KRAUSS and drawings by SERGIO RUZZIER. I've been a fan of Ruth Krauss before I began paying attention to author names, and that's because she was writing books while I WAS A CHILD. Yikes! That's a long time ago!
That kid-appeal quality was always evident in the words and point of view Krauss provided in her books, and I adored them. You can read more about Krauss in this great article from Brain Pickings blog. 
Sergio Ruzzier does not need my praise to bolster his stellar career.  Even so, I can imagine that despite his success and award-winning  reputation he may have been a bit anxious about being selected to bring this unpublished work by Krauss to life. After all, many of Krauss's books were illustrated by Maurice Sendak and Crockett Johnson, icons of picture book illustration. 
So what makes this book so special? Alphabet books range from academic to storytelling to subject-specific. In this case, Ruzzier has managed to capture the glorious, enormous imagination of Krauss's words with delightfully detailed and impishly illogical characters. His images both illustrate and expand the imperatives Krauss imagined. The charm of the front cover invites a quick peek at the back cover, which launches the reading with a laugh. Endpapers do the same, offering an array of insect-ish critters exploring their inner roaring voices and attitudes.
Krauss offers letter-inspired directives to execute various actions, making her words a fun library or preschool exploration of action and vocabulary. Some are suited to simplistic thinking: Make music, Nod yes, Hold your arms out like a pine tree. Others nudge imaginations beyond the literal: Eat all the locks off the doors, Paint a picture of a cage wth an open door and wait, Undress to match the trees in winter. 
Ruzzier recognized the magical miracle of Krauss's words, even the seemingly mundane ones, providing a page-by-page parade of wild wonderings. His characters are both recognizable critters (whales, mice, bugs, pigs) but also wryly off-center, with exaggerated shapes, sizes, colors, and attitudes. Krauss's "Fall like rain" reveals a sky of plummeting elephants while a kitten on the ground extends a paw from under the umbrella to check the weather. "X out all the bad stuff" shows an irritated mouse-ish fella marking X's on three slightly-too-unusual critters.The ironic appearance of potential enemies within individual illustrations adds to the humor: "Go like a road" has mice walking the spine of a snake from tail toward face- Surprise!
When it comes time to review nonfiction picture books (soon), I won't expect this level of wacky wondering to be as evident. But the power of words and images to elevate and transform each other WILL be among the qualities I'll consider. The power of picture books to explore core concepts has a long and successful history, establishing a high bar for excellence. This new book is a great example of this and will remind me to keep those kid-appeal and literary excellence criteria in mind.

*** I received a copy of ROAR LIKE A DANDELION from the publisher with no promise of reviewing it.