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rude cakes + rude cake craft!
Rude Cakes
by Rowboat Watkins (out June 2, 2015!).
I’ve got a lot of love for this one. It’s a manners book infused with fun and delightfulness and cakes! (And cyclopses!!)
Come see!
(click image(s) to enlarge)
One brilliant thing about this picture book (there are many!) is the use of the plural. “Rude cakes” goes the text while we see one particular pink rude cake doing all sorts of bad behaviors, from not saying please to never listening to its parents. It calls a cute marshmallow friend, “clumsy crumb” at one point illustrating just how rude a rude cake can be.
I love how the elder cakes have more tiers. How Rude Cake’s companions are a cupcake and a marshmallow. The muted color palette. The cyclops stuffed animal Rude Cake carries that comes into play in a BIG way in the story. And my favorite line?
“They also think baths are dumb and that bedtime is for donut holes.”
Oh but Rude Cake has it coming. A real, live cyclops plucks Rude Cake from its bedroom in order to wear it as a jaunty little hat. (Cyclopses love jaunty little hats.)
And thus, Rude Cake is on the other end of misfortune. Not because cyclopses are rude. Oh no, they are very polite.
But are they polite enough to listen to a jaunty little hat who finally asks nicely to be returned home, using that magic word, “please”? You’ll have to read the book to find out.
Thanks to Chronicle Books for images!
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This book calls for a craft, no? You could bake a cake! Or you could make a cute rude cake craft, one that can be worn as a jaunty little hat or kept around on a bookshelf!
Looks like frosting, but it’s actually something that will last a lot longer (and is NOT edible). Spackle!
Here’s how my dude and I made Rude Cake: We used two differently sized plastic plant tray liners taped together to form the cake shape. Then we mixed up some lightweight spackling paste and red food coloring to make a pink frosting-like material. We spread it on with a knife, super simple! After adding more red for a darker pink, we applied that with a pastry bag and decorating tip to the top and rim! Some paper circles for eyes and two more lines of “frosting” for Rude Cake’s mouth and voila!
Isn’t Rude Cake (hat) cute?! Especially since it’s no longer so rude. Just ask cupcake and marshmallow.
And, hey! You might be interested in my Hooray For Hat craft as well.
the baseball player and the walrus + ben loory interview
The Baseball Player and the Walrus by Ben Loory, illustrated by the hugely talented, Alex Latimer (2015).
This is an unusual picture book and not just in the usual ways. It’s more of a modern-day fable. And the tone and voice are all their own. It feels almost like a story that actually happened.
(click image(s) to enlarge)
There’s a ballplayer. And something’s missing from his life. And he finds it in a walrus at the zoo. That walrus becomes his companion, and he cares for the walrus in all the ways one cares for a walrus. And he becomes his friend.
And when hard times hit, the ballplayer still makes it his goal to be reunited with the walrus.
It seems to me he may have once cared about baseball the way he cares about the walrus. Or maybe he never did. Either way, at this point in his life, he’s looking for something more than baseball and this walrus is it. I find it interesting that he ends up sharing baseball with the walrus in the end though, a pure kind of baseball where they play catch and hit homeruns together, just the two of them in the backyard.
In reading reviews on Goodreads, it’s clear people connect to this book. They see the walrus as their passion, the thing they wish they could do but they can’t because they have this other job playing baseball. Or something like that. I think it was pretty brilliant to choose a baseball player since that seems on the surface like a dream passion kind of thing and taking care of a walrus more like a semi-regular gig. But that’s Ben Loory for you!
Big thanks to Penguin Young Readers for images!
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Ben Loory has been on my radar for a few years and I was delighted to see he’d made a foray into picture books.
You may have read his collection, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day. Or you may want to now. You may also have heard one of his stories read on This American Life. Or you could listen now.
And he was kind enough to answer a couple of questions for This Picture Book Life!
TPBL: How did the idea to write a picture book come about and was the story THE BASEBALL PLAYER AND THE WALRUS initially written for children or adults?
Ben Loory: I never write stories for anyone in particular; I just take the first line that comes to mind and follow the story to the end— then when it’s done, I try to find a way to publish it. The idea of doing one as a picture book came from my friend, the writer Cecil Castellucci, who mentioned it at the book launch for my collection Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day. The Baseball and the Walrus story seemed like a likely candidate, so my agent went out with that, and three years later, here we are!
TPBL: Did anything change about your writing in knowing it would be illustrated? Did you learn anything from writing an illustrated story?
BL: I wrote the story before I knew it would be illustrated, so no. I did take out a line where the baseball player was sued for breach of contract; apparently kids aren’t interested in legal disputes?? Otherwise, it remained as originally written. The main thing I learned from the whole experience is that Alex Latimer is a genius. My stories are a strange mix of goofiness and existential loneliness and his illustrations brought that out perfectly.
TPBL: What were your favorite picture books as a child?
BL: Sylvester and the Magic Pebble (the best book ever written), Robin and the Pirates, and The Great Alphabet Race (which I still dream about to this day). Also I was (and am) heavily into the George & Martha books, and, of course, Richard Scarry.
TPBL: Baseball fan? Walrus fan?
BL: I was a huge Mets fan when I was growing up, until they traded Ray Knight after winning the World Series in 1986. The same World Series in which he was named the MVP. Still can’t believe they did that. Unconscionable. As for walruses—they’re the best! Except maybe for chameleons (who get to wear the little mittens).
the blue whale by jenni desmond
The Blue Whale by Jenni Desmond (out May 27, 2015!)
This is one of those nonfiction books whose facts somehow make me cry. It’s partly the set up in the author’s note that blue whales are few in number due to human activity, from hunting to pollution. But it’s not just that. It’s the way this material is handled—from how the text is constructed to the dreamy illustrations.
(click image(s) to enlarge)
Part of Jenni Desmond‘s originality is how the story appears in the story of the picture book. The boy in the book is reading the very book we’re reading.
But there’s more! He enters the book. There he is, in a dinghy next to a mighty blue whale, staring down in wonder. Because this book is immersive. Immersive in the azure world of the blue whale.
The boy with the red crown is excited about this book he’s reading, excited about blue whales, excited about animals and habitats.
“Every blue whale has unique markings, similar to our fingerprints. Scientists use these, along with the shape of the dorsal fin, to identify individual whales.”
Together with the boy, we learn that baby calves are born 20 feet long and drink nearly 50 gallons of their mother’s milk every day. That whales have a lot of wax in their ear canals. That a single one of their breaths could inflate 2,000 balloons.
Along with the boy, we feel the world open up. It gets bigger and the blue whale gets smaller. Closer. More precious to us.
“A blue whale’s tongue weighs three tons, and its mouth is so big that 50 people can stand inside it. Fortunately, blue whales don’t eat people.”
And that’s how this book works. It brings the boy character inside it, it brings us inside it and conversely it brings the blue whale into our world, right outside our window and in our kitchen.
It’s the perfect kind of nonfiction book that educates while it enchants. It makes us care.
Thanks to Enchanted Lion Books for images!
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Jenni Desmond was kind enough to answer a couple of questions about her process of making the book!
This Picture Book Life:What prompted you to write a book about this particular animal?
Jenni Desmond: I didn’t choose a blue whale on purpose, it chose me, by just falling out of my head onto the page one day. Then, the more I drew this beautiful mammal the more I fell in love with it. There is still so much we don’t know about blue whales. I just found them endlessly fascinating and beautiful, and kept wanting to know more. When I showed the rough sketches to my wonderful editor, Claudia, at Enchanted Lion Books, she understood my vision for the book and tirelessly helped me to sculpt it into something much more complex and interesting.
TPBL: You include the book itself in the text and illustrations. How did the idea to do that come about?
JD: I wanted the reader to be aware of the fictional element of the story versus the factual. By having the young boy holding and reading the book, I felt that it would mean that there was a clear divide between the two. The facts could stay as facts, and the reader knew that the inclusion of the boy in the images, when he was interacting with the whale, was purely a result of the boy’s vivid imagination.
TPBL: Boy with red graph paper crown. Go!
JD: I think sometimes non-fiction can feel quite dense and difficult, so I hope that by including the boy, the reader can have a little bit of respite to digest the information while they watch the boy having fun, hopefully even seeing themselves in the boy. I‘m not sure why he’s wearing a crown. Why not. Maybe he’s the king of the book. Maybe he likes dressing up. Maybe it’s just a nice shape and gives a splash of colour to the page. Maybe it’s all of these things.
Thank you, Jenni, both for the interview and for this outstanding book!
three picture books that make great baby shower gifts
I’ve got two baby showers on the books in the next couple of months. And, of course, I almost always give at least one picture book to expecting parents.
Baby showers are all about anticipation. Soon, there will be clothes and diapers and bottles and a new life, finally here. And there will be snuggly bedtime rituals for many years. So, there will be stories. Here are three sure to be cherished.
SLEEP LIKE A TIGER written by Mary Logue, illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski.
This is exquisite, a picture book that could easily be displayed on a coffee table or a child’s bean bag chair. And it’s a bedtime book, that classic genre of children’s fare. It lulls a clever, unsleepy child while connecting to animals of the natural world who also sleep— bats and bears and, of course, tigers. Zagarenski’s signature artwork is truly dreamy to behold.
SEASONS by Blexbolex.
This has the feel of a classic even though it was published in 2010. And what better metaphor for parenthood (childhood, life) than seasons, right? Each spread contains screen prints labeled in a way that tells us something deeper about barren trees or lush greenery. It’s a book to look at, to spend time with, and to spur the reader on to someday moments spent outside.
ALMOST AN ALPHABET by Katie Viggers.
This will teach a child the alphabet when the time comes, but it will do more than that. It explores animals, from all the different kinds of bears to the luminosity of jellyfish. The artwork is gently comic and delightful.And there’s a yeti, and yetis are automatic crowd-pleasers. This is an alphabet book any artist of any age will appreciate.
Is there a picture book you always give at baby showers? Do tell!
this is sadie + interview with sara o’leary + fox masks
This is Sadie by Sara O’Leary and Julie Morstad (out May 12th!).
This picture book is about a girl and her imagination. She’s a reader, of course. But a maker, too. She’s a child being a child, during those magical times in a secure childhood when there is little expected of you but to use your imagination.
It’s wondrous in story and concept and artwork. I already know it will be one of my favorites from 2015 and a book to cherish always.
I was lucky enough to ask Sara O’Leary, one of my favorite authors and people, questions about writing the book. And she answered them!
(You know I’m a fan because I posted about When I Was Small my very first month of this blog!)
(click image(s) to enlarge)
See those first lines? Those are some of my favorite first lines of a picture book EVER.
This Picture Book Life: Can you tell me about those first lines? Was that the original start of the book?
Sara O’Leary: I wasn’t really conscious of this until you asked this question, but no, those first lines weren’t in the opening of the first draft. And as I go through line-by-line I see that nothing of that first draft survived verbatim into the words now on the page!
When I started working with Tara on revising the manuscript she got me to go through and make myself a dummy copy with illustrations. And to be honest, I’d never done this before even though it was something I’d counselled students to do. And when I went through that process it helped me to start thinking of the story visually and I arrived at the idea that I wanted the story to open out from Sadie rather than opening with her. And then I thought of the way kids play with boxes. My own son when he was small would play Jack-in-the-Box for what seemed like hours at a stretch.
And so that’s how we got to the box on the first page. But once we agreed on that idea of Sadie being concealed to begin with, it ended up influencing the choices we made when it came to the cover. And that’s how Sadie ended up wearing her little fox mask–which I now love.
Notice that fox stuffed animal? He pops up again and again. I really like that fox.
TPBL: Was the fox your idea or did Julie Morstad add in the fox on her own?
Sara O’Leary: There was a fox in the first draft of the story–a line about how when she grew up Sadie might get married and how she might marry a fox or a tin soldier but that she was in no hurry. And then the idea of her little fox family came in later. And then once Julie had added that into Sadie’s imaginative world I found that we didn’t need the line of text anymore. That happened a few times.
My favourite joke in the whole book is when the text says that Sadie is quiet in the mornings because old people need a lot of sleep and then we see Sadie merrily hammering away. My second favourite is when she “tidies her room” and we see everything madly stuffed underneath her bed. That sort of friction between the text and image pleases me inordinately.
It’s very strange because this is my fourth book with the fabulous Julie Morstad but it’s the first that really and truly feels like a collaboration rather than a co-creation. It’s partly a product of working with Tara Walker who is an absolute genius of a picture book editor–an Ursula Nordstrom for our times. It’s also partly a product of knowing Julie and her work so well that I was kind of writing the book for her this time and imagining it as a way of showcasing just what she can do.
“For me it started with the idea of her as a small girl
with a big imagination.”
A shout out to Julie Morstad here. This illustration stops me in my tracks. Luminous.
TPBL: What elements did Julie include that delighted or surprised you? What is your favorite illustration?
Sara O’Leary: There’s not a single illustration in this book I don’t love. My very favourites though are the picture book spreads–the entry of this new character into narratives that were part of my own childhood. It’s almost like stepping through the looking glass yourself. And for sheer beauty I love the fairy tale spread more than any other spread not just in this book but maybe in any book in existence. I love how brave and fierce and yet serene Sadie looks. When I was a kid my favourite poem was Isabel, Isabel by Ogden Nash and I see that in this image too. That little girl who bravely ate the bear up.
TPBL: Tell us a little bit about you as a child.
Sara O’Leary: I was very spoiled as a child in the sense that for my first five years I was an only child and my mother always had paints and clay and books and blocks and things for me to busy myself with–so that being a child who likes to “make and do and be” is very familiar to me. I was also, judging by the snapshots, a boy for about fifty per cent of my existence and so I like to think that like Sadie I could as easily imagine myself into being Mowgli as the Little Mermaid. And I kind of think it must be the same for Julie. The Alice in Wonderland spread came back to me and I was both pleased and amazed to realise that rather than placing Sadie in the role of Alice she had chosen to portray her as the Mad Hatter. It’s perfect!
Sadie is such a composite at this point that I find it hard to claim that she is really like me. She is but she is also like my kids, and like Julie and her kids, and also, I think, like our editor (and third collaborator) Tara Walker. I hope that she’s very easy to project yourself into–a bit like Sendak’s Max. A friend read the book and said: “Oh, you wrote this book just for me!” and really that’s about the best compliment you could hope for. Sadie’s pretty much childhood and imagination embodied for me.
Thanks to Sara for being so generous and talking with me about this magical book!
And to the wonderful people at Tundra Books for images!
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FOX MASKS!
This is Sadie‘s own activity kit includes a printable fox mask like the one Sadie wears on the cover!
And ever creative Kellie who made a peg doll in honor of Viva Frida has made one for Sadie over on her site! And Sadie’s wearing the fox mask! Here are some more:
Check out this super sweet paper plate fox mask too from mom.me.
You can go a step further with this felt DIY version from Fercute.
And I adore this paper maché mask from Ambeau!
Here’s another printable from Little Gatherer with a unique design.
Finally, this one’s for sale at KissMeGo.
With Sara O’Leary’s generosity, I’m giving away two This Is Sadie book jacket/posters over on twitter! (It features Sara (and my!) favorite spread from the book.) Come find me there and enter to win one!
