From the Momfilter Archives Putumayo‘s compilations of children’s music are such reliable standbys in the genre, so consistently good, that I end up never writing about them. I realize that doesn’t sound as if it makes any sense, but it does: It’s not because I take them for granted, exactly, but because I have this […]
Okay, we know, it’s a little late to be posting about shell necklaces, but we are just getting through our Momfilter emails, and spotted this one from reader Linda Dare. “Shell necklaces are not a new idea, but the addition of neon landyards makes them pop. Great gift for lifeguards!”
Zero the Hero is a math-lesson picture book that doesn’t feel anything like a lesson, because it actually tells a story. Author Joan Holub and illustrator Tom Lichtenheld (who clearly has a talent for this sort of thing, having also illustrated the similarly clever letter book E-mergency last year) make the titular digit a sympathetic outcast […]
Most holiday-themed children’s books, let’s face it, aren’t very good. Most are conceived and created mainly to be promoted at their respective times of the year, and accordingly aren’t terribly inspired. And Presidents’ Day would seem, if anything, an even worse holiday than usual for kids’ books; the preponderance of those pegged to it that […]
We have two young boys, so trains have been a major theme of our home for quite some time. The three-year-old grows more fascinated with them daily, his interest waxing conveniently apace with his older brother’s moving on to other things, like the new Wii that Santa brought this year. (This has all worked out […]
Graphic novels have gained a great deal of respectability since I was a kid. With the possible exception of Herge’s Tintin books—and those had European cred!—back then, the genre was linked more with its cousin, the comic book, than with other children’s books. And comic books were distinctly not respectable in a literary sense: Even the […]
Picture books for the youngest readers can be many things—beautiful, moving, offbeat. But sometimes children (and their parents, too) are just looking for something, well, silly. Satisfying this common craving is Stephen Shaskan’s new A Dog Is a Dog, a series of rhyming couplets illustrated in a pleasantly upbeat faux-retro style. The book begins as […]
Brian Selznick’s debut children’s book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, followed the path of every new author’s fantasy: It got magnificent reviews full of words like groundbreaking; it won a Caldecott; it became that book every parent tells every other parent about; and—just to make sure Selznick would be pinching himself—now it’s a major motion […]
I wrote last year (have I really been doing this that long already?) about my premature attempt to read The Phantom Tollbooth with my then-five-year-old, so it’s safe to say that Norton Juster’s classic is one of my own favorites. (It even made the cut on a list of personal picks I had to come […]
World music—a term no one really likes but no one has come up with a fully utilitarian replacement for, either—has always been a big part of children’s music, going at least as far back as Pete Seeger’s interpretations of folk songs from foreign lands. Today it’s pretty much its own subgenre; Putumayo alone puts out […]
Back in the anxious days before the arrival of my first son, I remember a work colleague who was already a parent asking me if I had any Dan Zanes albums yet. I didn’t know the name, and she looked at me a little incredulously across the divide that is parenting before smiling and saying, […]
Every now and then, you run into a book that establishes its author—someone whose work you weren’t familiar with—as a force to be reckoned with. It happens with books for adults, and it certainly happens with kid lit; we’ve all heard the stories of Maurice Sendak’s meteoric entry into the pantheon with Where the Wild […]
