BLOG/RELIEF: CHILDREN’S BOOKS FOR DAVID ROSS. David Ross, of the conservative filmblog Libertas, gave to the Red Cross, and has requested “five children’s books you haven’t read (but you should!)”. (The original blog/relief post, with the list of posts you can request, is here.) This list will be picture books; later I’ll do chapter books. …Oh, and these are all from memory (I’m at work, so can’t check the actual books), so some of the plot points may be a bit off. Feel free to write in with errata.

1. William Pene du Bois, Lion. The angels are sitting up in Heaven creating the animals. One angel gets carried away, and starts adding all kinds of crazy stuff to his animal–I seem to recall scales, fabulous colors, etc. But the resulting mishmosh animal is ridiculous. Frustrated, the angel starts trying to erase his animal, smearing the colors–and produces, by accident, the shaggy, tawny lion. It’s a beautiful book, with a real sense of the wonder of the natural world, and a lovely sense that mistakes and setbacks aren’t the end of the world. And possibly the source for a fun activity–xerox some pictures of real and fantastic animals (chimera, donkey, amphisbaena, unicorn, elephant, porcupine), get some scissors, construction paper, and paste, and make your own mix-and-match menagerie with your kid. I did this once and loved it–kept the menagerie pages for years.

2. Tomie de Paola, Prince of the Dolomites. This might be a bit of a cop-out, since everybody knows Tomie de Paola (don’t you?) for his fun Strega Nona books. (Possibly means “Grandma Witch”?) But I haven’t run across a lot of praise for Prince of the Dolomites, which I liked even more than the Strega Nona books. It’s a spooky, otherworldly story about a prince who loses his sight and starts going mad because he loves the princess of the moon. His family brings a bevy of lovely women to the mountain palace, in the hopes that he will fall in love with one of them and give up his impossible obsession; of course, he does not. There’s a happy ending, but my overall impression of the book is of a yearning, twilight world, eerie in the reflected light of the moon.

3. Elizabeth Levy, the Something Queer… books. A total change from the previous recommendation! These books are mysteries featuring two best friends, Jill and Gwen, and their basset hound Fletcher. So the titles are Something Queer at the Library, Something Queer at the Haunted School, etc. The pages are busy with little notes and arrows, the mysteries are fun, and the books are witty and charming.

4. Holling C. Holling, Paddle-to-the-Sea. This won a Caldecott, so I can’t pretend it’s obscure; but it’s a fantastic story. A boy carves a little wooden Indian in a canoe, and sends the Indian out to explore the waters–through the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. There are lumberyards and storms at sea, each page a lush, painted tribute to the beauty of North America.

5. I was going to name Patricia Tracy Lowe’s Tale of Czar Saltan–fierce, frightening, sublime story based on an Alexander Pushkin story and featuring color-drenched, stylized pictures–but it seems to be very hard to find, so I will fall back on Mercer Mayer’s Just for You. Mayer is also very well-known (we’ll see more of him in the chapter-books post)–he did the Frances books, about a little girl badger, and he also did There’s a Nightmare in My Closet, and everything he does is great–but my favorite is Just for You. A… what the heck is it, a porcupine? tries to bring his parents a gift… but things keep going wrong. And by “things” I mean “the little porcupine kid.” E.g.: “I picked an apple just for you… but I ate it on the way home.” Touching and completely true to childhood.

Runners-up for this list included Corduroy (little girl seeks teddy bear; little teddy bear seeks button); Eloise Greenfield’s Honey, I Love (sentimental favorite, classic black children’s book); and my quasi-obscure favorite Dr. Seuss book, Bartholomew Cubbins and the Oobleck. (Is that not the greatest band name ever?) I also remember loving Peanuts collections as a kid (and now!).

The NY Public Library system has a list here–lots of great titles.