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Mr. and Mrs. God in the Creation Kitchen
by Nancy Wood, illustrated by Timothy Basil Ering
When you've been married for an eternity, you pretty much live in your own universe, and you never know what the two of you
can concoct together, especially if you're the God family.
Wood gives us a Mr. God who likes the big stuff—stars, dinosaurs, explosions—and who's man enough to admit the
odd Jurassic blooper. Mrs. God bakes an earth whose crust isn't quite cooled. She whips up candy-colored fishies, only to
see Mr. God's pelican gobble them up. Whoops. He makes it up to her, though, with a spectacularly huge whale.
If we're made in their image, it's easy to see why: they may grouse a bit, but when they're in sync, watch out.
Basil Ering conjures up a kitchen crammed with overflowing pots and erupting ovens; the corpulent Mr. and Mrs. God float in
space heavily textured with acrylic paint in ethereal whites, grays and heavy blues. Spots of color draw our gaze to jars
of eyeballs and boxes of claws. The whale floats so far off the page, we can only make out a lumpy section of tale
overhanging the frying pan. The odd-shaped jars and Rube Goldberg-like kitchen gadgets aren't quite what you'd find at Target, and they fizzle and steam as Mr. and Mrs. God putter contentedly over molds of a doughy man and woman.
They're creative, those Gods, but messy. At least they wear oven mitts.
This tongue-in-cheek take on our origins shouldn't rile religious folks, but it may irk the godless types who want a more
exacting scientific explanation than one that still places our solar system—not to mention us—at the apex of
Creation. I suspect it's the latter group who will evolve a humorless gene about the whole thing.
Museum Trip
by Barbara Lehman
It's no secret that kidlets "read" illustrations, mostly by puzzling out the visual clues and piecing together a narrative,
even if makes sense only to them.
There aren't any words in this book, so it's up to parent and child to decide what goes on as a boy in a red hoodie makes
his way through a museum on a school trip. You follow that red hoodie off the bus and into a gallery with its sprinkling
of recognizable masterpieces by Van Gogh, Matisse and many others.
The boy looks up after tying his shoe and his classmates have vanished. He wanders alone into a side exhibit of mazes and
is suddenly transported into the meandering constructs. Here's where it gets murky—is he imagining this, or is this a
fantasy device?
Keep your eye on the hoodie. The splash of crimson creates a visual trail of crumbs for readers, pulling our eyes along as
the boy makes his way through the inky sketches on faded sienna parchments to a tower in the middle of the final maze.
Lehman brings us closer, closer, as we zoom in on the tower and the streaked, stained paper, until we peer through a keyhole
to see a gold medal placed around his neck.
The perspective lurches back to reveal him standing over the exhibit, so the mystery remains intact. Did he really get a
gold medal? Where is it? Keep your eye on...well, you know.
And as the museum director waves all the kids goodbye, what's that around his neck?
Now go back and reread the thing, looking again at the director early on. And scout for other clues—every new reading
will yield ones you missed, but they're often in the how and not the what.
The figures are flatly drawn, and when the boy appears alone on an otherwise blank, white page, you're drawn to his
expressions of surprise, confusion or happiness. The keyhole page is especially brilliant, as if we're peeking through our
own world into the mysterious one of the maze.
When he's in the landscape, he becomes a small, lost figure as wings of the museum lurch out of view or staircases lead
away from us, creating a labyrinthian space that echoes the mazes. Lehman uses perspective sparingly and with a handful of
straight lines and angles, creating a sense of movement that keeps pages turning without bogging us down in detail.
Yet the story that Lehman draws is pleasantly complex and visually exciting, aiming at both adult and kid so that each one
reads at their respective level.
Hippopotamus Stew and Other Silly Animal Poems
by Joan Horton, illustrated by Joann Adinolfi
I cracked this open and was immediately bitten by the green-eyed monster. These are exactly the kind of poems I hope to
write whenever I get a few 36-hour days. They're the amuse bouche of children's poems, pungent morsels that whet
your appetite for silliness.
Horton takes us through a menagerie of critters, adding quirky twists to familiar images, such as the jellyfish in a
variety of flavors that go well with peanut butter, or the snake who wants a zipper to help shed his skin.
The poems aim squarely at kid level, needing little or no explanation to make them hilarious, and will yield more yuks with
repeated readings as kids gradually "get" them:
The Sheep
With woolly fleece upon his back,
He's subject to a moth attack.
A nibble here, a munchie there,
And pretty soon the sheep is bare,
Which makes him look downright pathetic.
Too bad his fleece is not synthetic.
Unexpected rhymes and dead-on meter elevate these bits of whimsy to the sublime.
Adinolfi's collages are vivid confections of odd bits of paper, watercolor and colored pencil in cheerfully clashing
tropical hues.
Her renderings are flat in what I call the nouveau naive style designed to make the animals more playful and less
threatening, plus there's a multi-racial cast of kids. Sometimes she leaves wide washes of color for the text, and other
times lets white space do the talking for a less busy feel.
Mr. and Mrs. God in the Creation Kitchen, by Nancy Wood, illustrated by Timothy Basil Ering. Candlewick, 2006.
ISBN: 0-7636-1258-8.
Museum Trip, by Barbara Lehman. Houghton Mifflin, 2006. ISBN: 0-6185-8125-1.
Hippopotamus Stew and Other Silly Animal Poems, by Joan Horton, illustrated by Joann Adinolfi. Henry Holt and Co.,
2006. ISBN: 0-8050-7350-7.
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