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despite his success and award-winning  reputation he may have been a bit anxious about being selected to bring this unpublished work by Krauss to life.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.

How Picture Books Speak to Us: Listening with our Eyes.

What IS a picture book, anyway? 

When I was invited to speak to a workshop of experienced teachers I found the room filled with the nearly unanimously opinion that picture books meant wordless books. 

I'll get to that category in a few paragraphs, but picture books are simply books in which the visual images function as an essential part of the narrative of the book as a whole. 

Do wordless books do this?

Absolutely. 
Picture books encompass every conceivable genre-- information, nonfiction narratives, poetry, storybooks, fantasy, alphabet books, concept books, and board books (usually considered a special category), among many others. 

But the vast majority of picture books include text, in one way or another-- from speech bubbles and paneled text images to formally framed text alternating with framed illustrations... and everything in between. That text combines with the visual narrative resulting in a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Chronicle Books, 2016

So why is the quirky duck-ish character so convinced that THIS IS NOT A PICTURE BOOK! Author/illustrator Sergio Ruzzier utilizes every inch of this book to answer that question. The book jacket poses not only the clever title and key characters but subtly presents the premise of the story in gray text. On the opening end papers the conventions of text are evident (word chunks, left-to-right progression with punctuation, and recognizable letter combinations). With each page turn we discover more of the premise: a book, a many-paged, text-only book, has dropped into their lives. Only once the title question is relevant does the title page appear. 

Despite his/her protests about text being too hard, together they attempt to make sense of a senseless letter scramble, gradually discovering recognizable words, concepts, scenes, and emotions. The journey a (new kind of) reader takes within its pages eventually returns them home, satisfied and pleased. 
The charming final chirp, "READ IT AGAIN!" confirms that those who really read text, finding within it powerful visual narratives, will come to love those "not-a-picture-books" every bit as much as they do actual picture books. The final endpapers reprise the story in words, this time clearly readable.

Here's what I had to say about it on Goodreads:

Lovable on so many levels, with questions of word-reading, meaning-reading, visualization, book concepts, and concepts of the book. Author/illustrator Ruzzier explores this and more in his minimalist, humorous, and re-readable-to-the-Nth degree picture book. (And it IS a picture book, regardless of the title or endpapers!)

As my post title indicates, this little critter personifies a reader learning to listen with his reading eyes, converting that content into the visual narratives s/he seeks. 

Candlewick Press, 2016

Many illustrators have built wildly successful, award-filled careers creating wordless books. Among them is Jeannie Baker, whose creations include many wordless picture books. Her latest picture book, CIRCLE, depicts the incredible-but-true story of the global-migrating godwit (shorebird). She incorporates minimal but lyrical text and a story-within-the-story of a boy, his community, and the interconnectedness of communities around the globe. 

The illustrations are themselves as all-absorbing as the godwits' migration patterns. 
Children and adults alike will seek out subtle visual details, speculate on artistic creation techniques, and imagine how the art compares to actual birds-eye-views and topography. 

It's books like these that build readers/listeners who expect that every time a cover is lifted or a page turned there will follow multi-layered and engaging content far beyond lifeless images and robotic text. That's the expectation that allows learners to take that scary step into books without physical images to actively create them as they read.