Mustache Baby. By Bridget
Heos. Illustrations by Joy Ang. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $7.99.
Hooray for Hat! By Brian Won.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $7.99.
I Love Music: My First Sound
Book. By Marion Billet. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $9.99.
This is a welcome trend:
take kids’ books that were highly entertaining in their original picture-book
format and re-release them as board books so that even-younger children can
enjoy them. This will not work with all picture books, but when it does, the
results are absolutely delightful, as they are with Mustache Baby and Hooray for
Hat! Bridget Heos’ thoroughly silly story of a baby born with a great big
mustache – with his parents warned to be on the lookout to see whether it is a
good-guy type or a bad-guy type – translates wonderfully to board-book form.
Billy starts out with a “noble and just” mustache, using his power of goodness
to take care of the household pets and fix things for his big brother; then the
mustache, in some of Joy Ang’s funniest illustrations, accompanies Billy as he
becomes a pint-sized Spanish painter (a la Salvador Dali), a circus ringmaster
(called “ringleader” here for some reason), an aviator, a veterinarian, a sword
fighter, and a no-nonsense lawman – oh, Billy does all sorts of wonderful
mustache-y things! But then – uh-oh – Billy’s mustache starts to curl up at the
ends and turns into a “bad-guy mustache,” making his parents cringe and cry.
Now Billy misbehaves in all sorts of ways, even becoming “a train robber so
heartless that he even stole the tracks” (toy trains and toy tracks taken from
other kids his age). Finally, Billy’s mom has had enough, and she throws him in
jail (his crib), where he stays until he can behave properly and his mustache
reverts to good-guy form. So all ends happily, with Billy getting ready for a
playdate – which turns out, on the last page of the book, to be with a little
boy who sports a full-face beard. The silliness of the whole story will appeal
even to very young children, and parents will enjoy acting out some of the
good-guy and bad-guy parts of the book while having fun with Heos’ word games –
as when Billy becomes a “cat burglar” (running around carrying the cat) and
“cereal criminal” (sneaking cereal out of his older brother’s bowl). Originally
published in 2013, Mustache Baby
works just as well in its new board-book form as it did in its original layout.
So does Hooray for Hat! Brian Won’s book first appeared in 2014, and its
story is even simpler than that of Mustache
Baby. It is merely the tail…err, tale…of animal fiends who are in grumpy
moods and are cheered up, one and all, by getting to wear hats. It all starts
when Elephant wakes up in a bad mood, stomps downstairs, and finds a box on his
doorstep – containing a hat so tall and elaborate that “it was hard to stay
grumpy now.” Actually, this is a hat made up of lots of hats, as soon becomes
clear when Elephant walks over to see Zebra, who is equally grumpy but is soon
cheered up when Elephant gives him a hat from the hat group he is wearing.
“They both cheered,” writes Won, and both shouted “HOORAY FOR HAT!” – with the
word “hooray” in multiple colors. Now Elephant and Zebra move on together, this
time to Turtle, whose grumpiness is relieved by yet another of the hats that
Elephant is wearing – each hat being quite different from the others. On and on
the friends go, but when they reach the cave of Lion, it turns out that he is
not only grumpy but also sad, because Giraffe is not feeling well. Clearly
something hat-related must be done to resolve this, and so all the friends take
off their hats, reassemble them into their original multi-hat form, repack them
in the box in which Elephant found them in the first place, and go to visit
Giraffe. And of course all ends hattily…err, happily. Won’s book, like Heos’, is
one that young readers and pre-readers will enjoy on their own, and also one
that parents will have fun reading to children, especially ones who might
themselves feel just a tad grumpy from time to time. Getting kids to listen to
this book when they feel grumpy may
be a bit of a challenge, but parents who can do that will find Won’s writing
and illustrations to be a great antidote for everyday moodiness. There is just
no way to be down in the grumps after reading Hooray for Hat!
Nor can anyone be downcast
after experiencing Marion Billet’s wonderfully clever I Love Music, a board book that dates to 2011 in a Gallimard
Jeunesse version in French but is an original as an English-language board
book. It is original in other ways as well. With 14 pages of text and
illustrations, it is even shorter than many board books, but it does not seem short, because it is genuinely
interactive. Parents lift a flap in the book’s inside back cover – a flap
designed to be difficult for little fingers to open – and set the switch inside
to the “on” position; again, the switch is not for little fingers, being tiny
and even a bit tough for adults to maneuver (which in this case is all to the
good). When the switch is thrown, a battery-operated music chip is powered up,
allowing kids – yes, with their little fingers – to hear musical instruments
played by animals in half a dozen pleasantly drawn cartoon scenes. All it takes
is pressing a small round spot located on each animal’s instrument: Pig’s
recorder, Elephant’s piano, Cat’s violin, Zebra’s guitar, Bear’s drum, and Mouse’s
xylophone. The music generation is pretty good – much better-sounding than in
those ubiquitous musical greeting cards – and the musical tidbits run from four
to nine seconds and include a nice mixture of jazzy and classical sounds (the
violin even plays a bit of Brahms). After the individual-instrument pages, a
final page shows all six animals and instruments and asks kids, “Which one
would YOU like to play?” That is an invitation to go back and try all the
instruments again and again. Yes, the batteries powering the sounds will
eventually wear out, but they are replaceable (getting to them requires removing
two tiny screws – no chance kids will be able to do that). And the notes are
realistic-sounding enough so that very young children who become acquainted
with the instruments here for the first time will readily identify the way they
sound when they hear them later in recorded or played-in-real-life form. I Love Music really can help engender a
love of music, and that is quite an accomplishment for any board book.
No comments:
Post a Comment