Author: Judy Butler
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Insightful Title
Marisol McDonald Doesn’t Match by Monica Brown (2011), at first glance, looks like it might be a story about a unique personality, maybe an artistic child, so I grab it. Sara Palacios’ cover illustration shows a smiling red-head with pig tails hanging upside down. I don’t know which way is up until I read the…
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Why the limited palette?
The Brilliant Deep: Rebuilding the World’s Coral Reefs by Kate Messner (2018) is the story of Ken Nedimyer’s heroic attempts to restore dying coral reefs. There’s more information, references, and vocabulary at the back of the book. A photo of Nedimyer is on the last page. I won’t be creating a Picture Book Talk lesson…
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Pale Male x 3
I’ve enjoyed reading three picture books about a famous hawk from New York City. Pale Male arrived in Central Park in 1991 and eventually built a nest at 927 Fifth Avenue. He grew an international fan club. It’s fascinating how the three stories differ in text and illustration. City Hawk: The Story of Pale Male…
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The Picture Book Club
I have a subscription to The Picture Book Club. The theme of my subscription is “In Translation”, so I receive books first published in other languages. All but one of these stories has been quite gentle. The content more original than I’ve seen in my browsing. The illustrations also unlike the homogeneous digital art that…
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Retold . . . and Revised?
The Mitten by Jan Brett (1989) is one of her gorgeously illustrated stories that I read many years ago. What I didn’t remember was a note that precedes the story. It’s a full page explanation of how The Mitten is a Ukranian folktale that her friends brought to her attention. She looked for all the…
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Portals into the Past
In Coal Country by Judith Hendershot (1987) led me to learn about a catastrophic mine explosion on March 16, 1940 at the Willow Grove #10 mine. Despite several references to it online, I could not find its location. I watched an interview with an elderly man who was a breaker boy and saw footage of…
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Only similar, not the same
Flostsam (2006) started me on a quest to find books by David Wiesner. His imagination and craft are expontentially different from any other author/illustrator. Flotsam is a large book with a bold red cover: a fish’s head with a huge camera lens-like eye smack in the center of the picture. The main character in this…
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Wisdom wins the race
Susan Lowell adapted a famous fable in her book The Tortoise and the Jackrabbit (1977) to feature creatures of the American Southwest. Her characters are an elderly tortoise and a jackrabbit. I found this book in 2019, worked with it, and set it aside. In 2024, I picked it up again and discovered that Jim…
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But they cheated
The Biggest Snowman Ever by Steven Kroll is the story about a competition in Mouseville to build the biggest snowman. Clayton and Desmond realize that they can win if they work together. I’ve read this story many times. I accepted the message that collaboration has its benefits. Only now do I suddenly wonder why the…
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Salamanders x 2
Salamander Dance by David FitzSimmons (2016) has lovely paintings by Michael DiGiorgio. the Salamander Room by Ann Mazer (1991) has lovely paintings by Lou Fancher and Steve Johnson. Both books teach readers something about the salamander’s habitat, yet they do so in dramatically different ways. Ann Mazer’s story is so clever. It’s a conversation between…
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