Just One Wave: A Picture Book is the illustrated book result of a child’s frustration, and creativity about going to the beach when there aren’t any waves. Kids want big waves, but they’re rightly scared of them. However, if the waves are too small, or non-existent, then it can act as fuel for a child to act out or complain. This is especially true for those who go to the beach at a lake. Just One Wave’s author is Travis Jonke who lives near Lake Michigan, and it’s a logical leap to imagine that the body of water in this book is in his backyard.
Illustrated books are a genre whose entries have certain roles. Here is a Book has the role of calming elementary-aged students down. It’s the ASMR video students watch to make them realize that everything is ok. This is the book teachers will bring out when the class needs to chill out. The carpool line is forming. Kids are certain that they can see the front-end of their dad’s car, and the teacher is simply trying to get them to sit down. Here is a Book is the story of a book’s journey from quaint country farm with an ocean-view, to purchasing the book or reading it at school.
From the moment adults catch a glimpse of Bearsuit Turtle Makes a Friend they’ll suspect it’s a timeless illustrated book. The ‘bear’s’ mouth is black and glossy, begging for fingers and hands of any age to run across it. You are an adult, with a “real job”, decades past the enjoyment of such illustrated books, yet you just felt the book’s cover. Now you’re doing it again. The oversized, orange bear suit is stiff and is hosting an animal who is pretending to be a bear. Meanwhile, a friendly looking turtle, who is the same height as the green creature inside the bear suit, is looking at the bear with a dubious look on his face.
All hail the silly illustrated book. We reviewed a great silly book the other week, but it’s never too soon to read the silly again. Much like the well-respected Ministry of Silly Walks, a silly book is mandatory for carpet-time readers and the read-aloud crowd. All at Once Upon a Time is peak silly. To older audiences, it could be viewed as an absurd upending of fairytale tropes that most audiences can quote ad infinitum. Younger audiences who don’t know the tropes will enjoy All at Once Upon a Timebecause of the energy and laughter it produces from the things they thought would happen.
For a children’s concept that’s seemingly so simple, it took me years to understand it. In theory I should love Rube Goldberg. I love books and the idea of engineering, tinkering with things, plus what’s not to love about Rube Goldberg? It’s like steam punk. You’ve rig up everyday objects and arrange them so that their energy will make an impact on something, like opening a door or squeezing toothpaste out of the tube. It’s a simple act made needlessly, but entertainingly, complex. Rube Goldberg’s Big Book of Buildingsolves the issue that I had with the process on the very first page.
Author Amy Guglielmo and Jacqueline Tourville have a niche in children’s publishing that speaks to the white spaces in illustration. The blank spaces in illustrations can bring about as much power as the colored parts. A page full of color might seem like more, but it can be overwhelming and is too much. The two authors have paired up two times prior to Lucy! How Lucille Ball Did It All, and while each bok is different, they have strands that bind their quality and maintain their level of interest among elementary and lower-middle school readers. This is all the more surprising because the duo has written non-fiction books on women that typically have flown under the pop culture radar.
In How To Build A Hug they wrote about Autism expert, Dr. Temple Grandin. Pocketful of Colors: The Magical World of Mary Blair, Disney Artist Extraordinaire, told the story about a woman whose work people know, but few outside of the Disney-fandom could readily talk about or reference. With Lucy! How Lucille Ball Did It All, the two are partnered again with the Brigette Barrager, the illustrator that did the wonderful work on Pocketful. This trio work well together, or more accurately, Barrager’s style of art flows very well with the minimalist, yet detailed story they’ve created.
In both books, the subjects could’ve had a much more in-depth look at their lives or accomplishments. Lucy! is predomately about the very early years of Lucille Ball. When she was very young her father died and she lived with her relatives, who did not agree with her constant tomfoolery. This led her to play by herself most of the time. When her mother returned from working in a different city, it allowed Ball to see how much of her she could become.
She performed in local plays, school functions or any activity that let Lucille be the funny person she wanted to become. Her mother saw the passion Lucille put forth, as well as, the local success she had, so she scrounged up the money to send her to acting school in New York City. When Lucille got there she saw that she had the drive, but that because she wasn’t a singer, dancer or dramatic person her ability to make people laugh was going to be challenging. She jumped at any opportunity to get in front of audiences and continued slogging it away. Lucile kept at it, honed her slapstick skills with Buster Keaton and was there when movies started being filmed in Technicolor.
This led to her coloring her hair bright red, which yielded more bit parts in 60 movies over ten years. Unfortunately, this was the same serious stuff that paid bills, but wasn’t the funny money that she knew was in her blood. That fruit happened when she signed on to be a funny housewife in a radio comedy show, My Favorite Husband. It was taped in front of a live audience, which scratched the itch she had for making people laugh and became a very successful show. As television was a new medium it was logical that this be translated to the small screen and the rest of Lucille Ball, I Love Lucy, Desi Arnaz, and the legend that she wrought is history.
I remember watching I Love Lucy I as a kid. I’ve seen snippets of the show as I wrote this review, which is one reason it took me so long to do. One highlight begets another highlight and so on, the show still holds up today and its humor translates to modern audiences. The only thing that will preclude it from being enjoyed by elementary or middle school audiences to the same degree is the fact that it’s in black & white, and much of the humor is based around relationships. There are still some hilarious physical gags and mistaken identity bits that don’t require any age limit to watch and enjoy.
Lucy! sets up the events and time period that lead up to her iconic television show. The story of never giving up, working hard for what you want and having the patience to see it through are characteristics that anyone can benefit from. You could easily imagine anyone who has trained hard for something, but had to wait decades until it was their time to go on stage, perform the operation, walk in space or do whatever had led them to that point. It’s resilience 101, a trait that some kids need lots more of and Lucy! is just the entertaining kind of book that they’ll enjoy reading and just might learn something from.
Lucy! How Lucille Ball Did It All is by Amy Guglielmo and Jacqueline Tourville with illustrations by Brigette Barrager and is available on Abrams Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Abrams Books.
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The below was not in the I Love Lucy show, it might not even be about Lucille Ball, but it’s a great song from a criminally underrated band.
This book will not interest me because the main character’s name is Belva. At one point that name was probably super popular, but then it became something that’s more associated with crackers. Ballots for Belva seems like that, but it is very fascinating, educational, and eventually, entertaining. It’s especially so for know-it-all people, elementary school kids or those who are otherwise looking for the exception to every rule. It’s a non-fiction, illustrated book highlighting the first woman to complete a presidential election cycle and receive votes. That’s a complex way to describe it and exposes the issues of being a book about ‘the first (insert blank here) to…..’, but Ballots for Belva addresses those weaknesses, and moves on from them to deliver a concrete story that we can all hopefully put behind us.
Where did you go to school? How is it that you’re able to envision things in such a manner that they fold out into such a grandiose, artistic fashion? If I were able to chat with Matthew Reinhart those are only a couple of the questions that I’d ask him. Reinhart’s pop-up books defy logic. It’s obvious that they pop-up, and one might expect a book along those lines to come off of the page. What Reinhart creates is mind-blowing art that comes off of the pages 12’ high and has multiple elements. Marvel Super Heroes The Ultimate Pop-Up Book takes on the MCU and entertains, as well as educates in ways that’ll make this a coffee table book for the pop culture savvy.
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