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This month The Edge of the Forest reviews picture books devoted to three kinds
of beauty. There's finding the beauty in the every day (A Day at the Market), celebrating kid-centered, pinked-out
beauty (Ellen's 11-Star Spectacular Superdeluxe Hotel, Pinkalicious), and finding and creating beauty in
difficult times (Mia's Story). The picture book is the perfect genre for exploring beauty, and these titles live up to the
challenge.
Mia's Story
by Michael Foreman
Reviewed by Anne Boles Levy, Book Buds
Let's say you were to open an artist's sketchbook to see what he's scribbled there. You'd expect to see a few pen-and-ink
doodles, some messy notes, perhaps a few fuller pictures that have been fleshed out and colored in.
You might feel a thrill peering in on a work in progress, hoping to glimpse the whirring gears of a creative mind.
That's what I felt reading this journal of Foreman's encounter with a young girl who lives in a garbage dump outside
Santiago, Chile.
Upbeat, redemptive stories about girls living in garbage dumps surely don't come along every day, but Foreman shows us what
captivated him about the family. As he writes on the back flap:
"For Manuel and his fellow villagers, the trash was a crop to be harvested, recycled, and made useful once more."
Mia is Manuel's only daughter, whom Foreman encounters when his bus to the Andes mountains breaks down in her village. A few
cross-hatchings here, a wash of blue or beige there is enough to conjure up the splay of rickety hovels that pass for a
village or Manuel's rusting truck. The story is scrawled on the scraps of paper:
"Sometimes Papa comes home happy with money in his pockets, and sometimes he comes home sad with none."
Foreman is the master of small gestures, as Manuel hugs his daughter or pulls a puppy out of his jacket for her, his thin
face a gaunt landscape of hardship despite his grin. The puppy soon runs off, and Mia's pursuit into the mountains leads
her to a white flower that she brings home and cultivates, until after a couple years it covers the dingy village in snowy
blooms and offers a chance at another source of income.
The flower is probably some sort of lily, an appropriate metaphor for redemption and purity. Because the chance encounter
isn't just between the artist and an innocent, ever-hopeful Mia, but between her world and ours, where our assumptions about
what it takes to be happy seem startlingly provincial.
Each scrap of paper in the artist's notebook becomes a passport into another culture, where wealth is measured by how well
you enjoy what you have.
Ellen's 11-Star Spectacular Superdeluxe Hotel
by Larry Schwarz, illustrated by Kelly Denato
Reviewed by Anne Boles Levy, Book Buds
What's funnier, taking swipes at celebrities or white trash? Gosh, that's a tough one.
I consider ridiculing either to be art forms, one of life's churlish pleasures right up there with not coming to a complete
stop or ruining the punchlines to dirty jokes. It's also one of my core parenting values that no child is too young to be
inculcated in the proper way to snicker.
I therefore embraced Ellen, an imaginative and wistful lass who revels at a resort and its exotic visitors and then, with a
guilty shrug, admits it's really a seedy, nearly lifeless motel her parents own in Carson City, Nevada.
Of course, if she merely lived there—implying she was homeless—that would be tragic. But owning? Heh. That gives
us permission to chortle malevolently at the dual illustrations; Denato's chartreuse-hued, starry fantasy world that Ellen
dreamily conjures versus the "well, actually" pages done in dusty browns with a splash of institutional green.
We meet the preening glitterati who populate Ellen's imagination; really the usual goofy layabouts and fat, dowdy locals.
Again, which is funnier? You decide.
This diminutive Walter Mitty makes the most of a radial tire and feather duster, which undergo transformations to make
Cinderella's pumpkin jealous. Then someone steals the crown jewels of Sedelbania (Mrs. Sedelberg loses her luggage) and
Ellen dons detective garb. Voila! A gumshoe is born.
Schwarz is a former child actor and a writer/producer type. Why someone who makes big bucks in animation should stoop to a
humble picture book is beyond me; the same can be said of Denato, with a similar portfolio of animation and even album
covers. This is a first for both.
What is it about kidlit that screams "validation" to people like this?
Back to the review: Funny or not to worldly wise grown-ups, I'm not sure how much kids get it. The "it" being the toxic
cocktail of socioeconomics, geography and even the red/blue dichotomy that make the pictorial snarkiness work, with digs at
how both halves live. Because this isn't one of those books that celebrates human foible or loves us despite our flaws.
This is just plain wicked. Heheheh.
Pinkalicious
by Victoria Kann and Elizabeth Kann
Reviewed by Kim Peek, One Over-Caffeinated Mom
Pink. Pink. Pink. Pinkalicious loves pink. One rainy day, she helps Mommy bake pink cupcakes with pink frosting. She
gobbles them and begs for more, more, more. The next morning, she wakes up and discovers she has a horrible case of
pinkititis.
The doctor says she must eat a steady diet of green foods, but she can’t resist the pink cupcakes sitting on top of the
refrigerator. She eats just one more, and licks the wrapper clean. This time, she turns bright red—which anyone who
loves pink knows is a very bad thing. She rushes to eat all the green food she can find, and tickles, tingles and twitches
back to herself again.
This picture book sings! The words are delicious and the pictures made me want to gobble each and every page. The rich
illustrations leap off the page. Full of pink and lace and crowns, this book is a girly-girl’s dream!
My three princesses loved this book so much, we used it as an excuse to throw a party. We paired Pinkalicious
with another favorite, Cowboy Camp by Tammi Sauer, and hosted a summer reading party.
On a 100-degree Friday in July, 15 kids arrived at Camp Pinkalicious. To get in the spirit, we did nails and
hair—pink nails and pony tails with pink hair spray and pink ribbon hair ties. (We also gave the option of silver or gold
spray—or no hair and nail decorations at all).
After everyone was “pinked up,” we read Pinkalicious by the tents. Next, everyone painted reading pillows (plain
white pillowcases they could use for reading during the school year.) We rang the dinner bell, and the kids reported to the
mess hall for cowboy dinner. To make things easy, we served hot dogs, baked beans, carrots and chips served in tin pans.
After everyone ate, we read Cowboy Camp before heading to the obstacle course for a tin can shoot (with water guns),
sack races, horse shoes and hula hoops. By this point, everyone was hot, so we ended the obstacle course portion of the
night with a water balloon fight.
The pink divas, now wet and dripping pink hairspray, were warmed up and ready for Campground Karaoke and s’mores. They sang
lots of “girl power” songs, and the obligatory High School Musical songs. While they waited for their parents to arrive,
they made book marks, browsed for a new book (we asked each child to bring a used book to swap), and guzzled lemonade.
The kids went through over five gallons of water, four liters of root beer, two quarts of lemonade—and 300 water balloons!
It was a hot, but entertaining, night with 15 kids shrieking in my backyard.
There's nothing like a good book to inspire a party. Our summer reading party was so much fun, the girls are already
begging to make it an annual event. What surprises will the 2007 releases bring? I can't wait to find out!
A Day at the Market
by Sara Anderson
Reviewed by Anne Boles Levy, Book Buds
Sometimes you know a place so well, you memorize it like a song in your heart. Such is Anderson's obvious feel for
Seattle's Pike Place Market, where she's lived and shopped and created for 25 years.
Open this dazzling book and plunge into the bustling farmer's market, where vendors hawk and customers scurry and even a
hobo dumpster-dives. Color explodes off pages of cut paper, with windows that offer peeps into other pages and crowded new
vistas.
I've visited this national treasure only once, as a special treat for my 40th birthday. Our pixelated photos can't do
justice to what Anderson captures with rhyming text that rips along in a syncopated approximation of street noises and
market chatter:
Bakers baking,
heaven lingers ...
Plain or frosted?
Cinnamon fingers.
In a word: Yummy.
Mia's Story: A Sketchbook of Hopes and Dreams, by Michael Foreman. Candlewick, 2006.
ISBN: 0-7636-3063-2.
Ellen's 11-Star Spectacular Superdeluxe Hotel, by Larry Schwarz, illustrated by Kelly Denato.
Little, Brown Young Readers, 2006. ISBN: 0-3168-6902-3.
Pinkalicious, by Victoria Kann and Elizabeth Kann. Harper Collins, 2006, ISBN: 0-0607-7639-0.
A Day at the Market, by Sara Anderson. Hand Print, 2006. ISBN: 1-5935-4149-X.
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