Celebrating Children's Book Week With Brand New Picture Books, Part One

Hey, you Yes, you with the dazzling smile The donkey wants your vote. So does the elephant. And each will do just about anything to win your support. Brag? Sure Flatter? Absolutely Exaggerate, name-call, make silly promises and generally act childish? Yes, yes, yes and yes. Soon, the tension mounts, and these two quarrelsome candidates resort to slinging mud (literally) and flinging insults. And what happens when the election results are in? Well, let's just say the donkey and the elephant are in for a little surprise -- and a certain bewhiskered, third-party candidate is in for a first term. Vote for Me is a timely satire of American politics, but it's a story readers of all nationalities and ages will recognize. Comical, retro illustrations (in shades of blue and red, of course) are completely winning, and the duelling duo's insult-laden exchanges promise to have readers laughing out loud.

It’s a factual face-off in this superhero picture book from all-star Peter Catalanotto.

Question Boy wants answers. He lives for them. But none of the town’s action heroes—Oil Man, Paperboy, Police Woman—can satisfy Question Boy’s heroic need to know!

Enter Little Miss Know-It-All. She has an answer for every who-what-where-when-and-how…and what she doesn’t know she simply makes up.

And what about you? Ready for a wrangle? Keen on a quibble? Then come along to the town park to cheer the two of them on! Vibrant, rich illustrations merge fantasy with reality in this exploration of questions, answers, and what it means to be right.

When the Man in the Clouds creates a beautiful painting, people begin to make a pilgrimage up his mountain to see it for themselves--the misfits find it especially comforting. An art expert tells the artist that it is very valuable and he begins to think about differently, determined to protect it rather than share it. Finally, he sees that his greed and possessiveness has changed the way he sees the picture so he tosses it into the fire and looks out the window with fresh eyes, seeing again the beauty that enthralled him in the first place.

In a picture book that blends realism and fantasy, a shoeshine boy is surprised when apiece of red silk falls from the sky. Trying to find its owner, he ventures up and down fire escapes, back and forth across clotheslines, and into the company of the colorfully diverse people who live in the tenement. Lively pages laid out in multiple panels, with a few words of text in dialogue balloons, capture the exhilarating action, and foreignlanguage
phrases are translated on the endpapers. There is a cheerful side to a neighborhood packed with people of different origins—the opportunity to make friends across race lines, culture lines, and clotheslines!