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Necessary books for the youngest book lovers.
By Laura Krauss Melmed
Babies provoke universal delight and curiosity in young children, and the dozen thumb-sized infants featured in Laura Krauss Melmed’s tale are bound to prove particularly alluring. Jim Lamarche’s illustrations have a lustrous magic of their own -- they glow with an enchanted quality that perfectly matches the fairy-tale spirit of Krauss's beguiling story.
By William Steig
No one has better melded magic, whimsy, and sly wit than William Steig, the creator of Shrek and Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. In this characteristically imaginative concoction of adventure and playful fantasy, a young frog with a talent for home chemistry creates a powerful potion -- but finds its effects to be a bit more than he bargained for.
By Else Holmelund Minarik
Few partnerships between author and illustrator have proven as unforgettably successful as Maurice Sendak and Else Holmelund Minarik's collaboration on these stories about a young bear and his family. Sendak's talking animals, rendered in a winning pen and ink style, have a delightfully old-world air, while Minarik's compact tales of Little Bear's antics are perfect both as bedtime stories and -- a bit later -- first achievements for young readers.
By Crockett Johnson
Author and cartoonist Crockett Johnson first achieved public reknown in 1942, for his daily comic strip Barnaby, but it was twelve years later that he crafted this, his most enduring work. With its astonishingly minimalist approach, the story of Harold’s journey -- which starts as a simple walk in the moonlight, and winds up as an ocean-crossing, mountain climbing, balloon-piloting adventure -- develops its theme of the power of creativity in a manner that needs no interpretation. (And besides, there’s pie.)
By Robert McCloskey
The city of Boston paid public tribute to Robert McCloskey’s Caldecott-winning book about a pair of Mallard ducks and their brood by placing a bronze statue of the avian family in the Boston Public Garden, where the fictional ducks take up temporary residence. With its duck's-eye-view of a busy city as negotiated by the nervous Mallard mother, and the gentle drama of the feathered family's search for a safe home, this is a book that engrosses young readers, even as it deliciously soothes. Bedtime!
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"The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science," Jean Strouse writes of her subject's more famous brothers, "Alice simply lived." It took a biographer of sensitivity and brilliance to give that "simply" the profundity it deserves, and the resulting book, now reissued in the peerless NYRB Classics series, is one of the richest life stories you'll ever read.
The world of Jane Austen's fiction has long been an imaginative playground for writers and readers of a certain stripe. Shannon Hale's Austenland wittily took the next step, setting comic romance in a faux-Pemberly resort for the Darcy-smitten. Her latest returns for more Regency fun, but with a twist: does murder stalk Pembrook Park?
Childlike retreat? Arts and crafts challenge? Frugal and eco-friendly living option? The notion of the "tiny house" has the surprising potential to fire the imagination. In this exuberant volume of sketches, plans, and commentary, the artist Derek Diedricksen shares his infectious enthusiasm for the idea of the micro-mansion.
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