I Want My Hat Back by Governor General Award Winner Jon Klassen is my favourite book of the year. Yes, there are still three months left in 2011, and yes, I have lost my heart to several wonderful books in the last nine months, but I stand by by my statement. A book about a bear looking for his lost hat, with simple yet breathtakingly lovely illustrations, and even simpler (but hilarious) text is a perfect creation. And I kinda knew it would be just from the cover. Some books, like some people, have a charisma that precedes them. Maybe it’s the bear, who looks like a beaver, all alone on the cover, with a slightly accusatory expression on his face. Bears already hold an esteemed place in children’s literature. Who doesn’t love Brown Bear, Brown Bear by Eric Carle, or the perpetually troubled Berenstains? We may fear bears in the woods, but in picture books, a bear is a slam dunk, and in I Want My Hat Back, the bear is a star in the making.
Mirror, Mirror
Beautiful Griselda is a fairy tale about the perils of narcissism and the difficulty of keeping your wits about you, especially the parts of your anatomy containing your wits, when confronted by the object of your desire. I think we can all relate…to a degree.
Princess Griselda is beautiful. Really, gobsmackingly beautiful. Everyone who casts their eyes upon her lovely visage falls head over heels in love with her. Literally. Their heads pop off like corks. Griselda is greatly amused by this, and makes a collection of her admirers, varnishing their heads and placing them under glass or on the walls like stuffed trout. Yes, grisly Griselda is a bit of a monster, more interested in perfecting her lethal form of beauty and growing her ‘collection’ than finding a nice little froggie to kiss. Lucky froggies.
To keep the princely heads rolling, Griselda’s daily beauty ablutions include bathing in cold spring water, slurping juice from sour Tasmanian fruit, posing in crystal shoes, and of course, stray hair removal, courtesy of her ladies in waiting (to have their heads pop off.) And, like all narcissists of the royal persuasion, Griselda takes more than a little pleasure in knowing that people throughout the land are obsessed by her beauty, misinterpreting fear for admiration.
And yet…a mirror makes for poor conversation, and even the self-absorbed get bored…
Coppernickel
For many reasons, most of them involving packing tape, it’s been almost a month since I’ve reviewed a book in this blog. It’s become quite apparent that my brain cells must be somewhat settled before the words can flow. Not the opinions, which spew out of my mouthparts in spite of, and because of the stresses afflicting my grey matter, but writing a simple ‘I love this book’, however exuberantly expressed, just doesn’t fly in the cutthroat world of children’s picture book blogging. Nevertheless, I love Coppernickel, The Invention and I knew that once my discombobulated neurons got sorted and the packing tape put away, I would be in a position to expand on this premise. Turns out, all I needed was a blank sheet of paper.
