Books for Kids: Turn these pages for a summertime escape

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With kids out of school for the summer, nature beckons and chances are much of their time will be spent outside. But in case of rain or scorching heat, escaping indoors where it’s air conditioned or relaxing in a hammock between a couple of shade trees and losing oneself in a book is another benefit of summer holidays. Below, some titles to get your youngsters started. 

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Books Make Good Friends
Written and illustrated by Jane Mount
Chronicle Books
Ages 5 to 8 

Lotti, a young girl who struggles with shyness and has difficulty making friends, is a voracious reader and can lose herself in books, accompanied by her cat Ramona. “I get along with animals better than with people,” she tells us. While her classmates make friends and play with each other during recess, Lotti keeps to herself and watches them, wishing she could join in. “I read a book instead,” she says. “Books make good friends.” They also, it turns out, help her bridge the gap and eventually connect with other book lovers. By the end of this volume, readers have seen Lotti share dozens of favourite books as well as a recipe for Lotti’s Friend-Making Cookies.

Author and illustrator Jane Mount knows her kids’ lit and depicts stacks of recognizable titles throughout this book — from classics like Goodnight Moon and Charlotte’s Web to more recent publications like A Is for Bee, and Skunk and Badger. Readers of all ages will enjoy peering through the artful stacks, looking for old favourites and finding new titles to explore this summer.

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Once Upon a Book
By Grace Lin and Kate Messner
Illustrated by Grace Lin
Little, Brown and Co.
Ages 4 to 8 

Grace Lin’s endpapers depict a dreary winter day — one that may, however, look appealing to readers dealing with a summer heat wave. But young Alice has had enough. “I wish I were someplace that wasn’t so frozen and grey!” she grumbles, swapping her winter clothes for a sleeveless summer dress that appears to be made of newsprint.

As she stomps off, the pages of a book beckon and Alice enters a wonderland of her own, becoming part of the book’s colourful and exotic illustrations at the invitation of animals, clouds and stars gracing its pages. The text is simple and to some degree repetitious, but the illustrations are wonderful and occasionally breathtaking. 

The Little Books of the Little Brontës
By Sara O’Leary
Illustrated by Briony May Smith
Tundra Books
Ages 5 to 9 

Canadian author Sara O’Leary, based in New Brunswick, has written a wonderful book about the famed Brontë sisters (British authors of novels including Wuthering Heights) in their youth, evocatively illustrated by England’s Briony May Smith. Focused on the years when Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their brother Branwell were motherless children living with their father, an aunt and a housekeeper in a house at the edge of the moors, O’Leary describes how they craved stories and read anything they could get their hands on. To entertain themselves, they made up their own stories and created miniature books for Branwell’s toy soldiers to read.

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A paean to children’s imagination and resourcefulness, the book includes a two-page how-to section on making one’s own little book, as well as a detailed timeline of the family’s lives beginning in 1820, when Patrick and Maria Brontë moved into Haworth Parsonage with their six children, ages six and younger. Two of those children, Maria and Elizabeth, died at 11 and 10 years of age.  

Good Books for Bad Children
By Beth Kephart
Illustrated by Chloe Bristol
Anne Schwartz Books
Ages 4 to 8 

Subtitled The Genius of Ursula Nordstrom, this picture book tells the story of “a groundbreaking editor of children’s books who had a very special gift for spotting and encouraging talent.” Beth Kephart’s text opens with a sensitive look at Ursula Nordstrom as a child — one whose parents divorced when she was just seven, and who was shipped off to boarding school right after the divorce.

In 1931, when she was about 21, she took a job in the college textbook department of Harper & Brothers as a clerk and typist. She befriended a woman from the department of books for boys and girls, and agreed to become her assistant in 1936, revelling in learning about children’s literature. Four years later, when the woman left, Nordstrom was promoted to her position — selecting, editing and publishing children’s books. Or, as she liked to say in her unorthodox way, creating “good books for bad children.”

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The books in which she had a hand included E.B. White’s Stuart Little (1945) and Charlotte’s Web (1952), Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon (1947), Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon (1955), Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) and In the Night Kitchen (1970) and Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends (1974). This fitting and well-deserved picture-book biography is not only well written, but memorably illustrated. 

Good Night Little Bookstore
By Amy Cherrix
Illustrated by E.B. Goodale
Candlewick Press
Ages 2 to 5 

In a rhyming text reminiscent of the soothing rhythms of Goodnight Moon, author Amy Cherrix follows a bookstore owner and her cat through the daily process of closing up shop. E.B. Goodale’s colourful illustrations — done in gouache, oil paint, crayon, black tea, and collage on Kitakata paper — befit the slim pages of this vertical volume. Once the owner has locked up and we get the author’s final text (“Good night, little bookstores, near and far”), the illustrator gives us a page of shopkeepers locking up bookstores in foreign locales. (I was delighted to see one bearing a “Boekwinkeltje” sign, in my Dutch mother tongue.) Turn that page and readers get a final gift: a two-page spread showing the Little Bookstore and its owner, surrounded by neighbourhood people on the street, in a car or their apartments, on a rooftop and below a streetlamp — all reading. An invitation if ever there was one.

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