Some Great New Children's Books

Every few months I try to grab a few recent Horn Book issues from the library and scan the reviews and ads for new children's books that look fun. Then I get online and reserve a bunch of titles from my local library, which is now a huge conglomeration of Hennepin County library and the Minneapolis libraries. So I can usually find anything I want, I just have to wait for it to get to my branch where I pick up my reserves. It's quite satisfying, a definite improvement over ye olden days when you had to go ask the librarian in person for every book you wanted.

So here's what I've gotten lately that I like:

Mermaid Queen by Shana Corey
This big picture book biography is gorgeous and fascinating. It's a bit too texty for Lily right now, but I mostly got it for me to read anyway. It's the story of Annette Kellerman, the real-life inspiration for Esther Williams. I always thought Esther Williams was, well, a mermaid queen herself. Who knew there was an even more interesting real-life woman who was a real queen of the water?

Annette Kellerman was a sort of swimsuit suffragette for women, rebelling against the ridiculously uncomfortable swimwear of her time (the early 1900s). This was no small feat. The first time she swam in public in America (she grew up in Australia and England), she was arrested for her shockingly revealing swimwear (while the other women on the beach sweated it out under their parasols on the hot sand, too poofy and heavy to actually go into the water)! Celebrating swimming as both an athletic and artistic pursuit, she paved the way for female athletes all over the world.

The artwork is--dare I say it?--splashy. And I mean that in the best way possible. It's appropriate for the subject matter, and the bold color palette of artist Edwin Fotheringham is delicious to behold. Not only is water illustrated with curving, swlirling shapes, but everything from the sound of music to the night sky seems to take on the joyful shapes of water as well.

The Fantastic Undersea Life of Jacques Cousteau by Dan Yaccarino
Yes, another book about humans in the water. A large part of my childhood was spent in the water, and I miss it! I want to go back to the beaches of my youth. And the swimming pools. Especially the backyard swimming pools. But I digress.

Cousteau was kind of a skinny little runt, so his doctors suggested he build up his strength by swimming. Then when he was a young man, he got in a bad car accident and had to wear braces on his arms. His fate was sealed soon after this, but not by his injury. He built strength in his arms by going back to the sea and swimming. Then a friend lent him some goggles and he suddenly saw all the fishies in the sea underneath him.

Yaccarino does the artwork as well as the story, and it's wonderful to see how he transforms Cousteau's scrawniness on land to lithe grace underwater. In one layout, Cousteau's swimming form parallels the shape of an octopus swimming above him. The colors are bright and many-layered, like the rich palette of undersea life Cousteau is exploring.

Like Mermaid Queen Annette Kellerman, Jacques Cousteau was a pioneer in his field. Today we take scuba suits for granted, but the diving suit of Cousteau's day was like an iron spacesuit. Cousteau worked with engineers to invent diving equipment that allowed him and his team to swim like fish. Likewise underwater camera equipment.

The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau (of which I have fond memories) ran for ten years on television, and served as Cousteau's platform to both entertain and educate the world about the vast array of life in our oceans that needed our protection. Yaccarino does a nice job of portraying Cousteau as a man who wanted to share his joy and passion, in contrast to a celebrity with a cause-of-the-week.

This is a fabulous book. I'm going to buy a copy to keep for Lily (and me), because I think it works on so many levels. The artwork is so good that it can be explored on its own, and the story is appealing in a classic way, like a rags to riches tale, where the rags are Cousteau's physical limitations and the riches are his exploration of the undersea world--and most importantly, the joy this brings him!

And that concludes today's book reviews. Hope you enjoyed them! Oh, and if you don't get the Horn Book at your library or you aren't familiar with this bible of children's book reviews, you can always look at a few pages of reviews of the current issue online. Here's a sample.