Pass It Down - Leonard Marcus

Five Picture-Book Families Make Their Mark
Walker & Co., 2007
$19.95
Really interesting
Endpapers: Glossy bright yellow

What an interesting book! It tells about five different families - all familiar to picture book readers - with photos of the family and illustrations of their work. I was particularly looking at the Myers family (since I'm on a roll with Creech's Love That Dog and Hate That Cat, but was very interested in the other four stories as well.

Included are:
The CREWS and JONAS family: Donald Crews, Ann Jonas, and Nina Crews
The HURD family: Clement and Edith Thacher Hurd and Thacher Hurd
The MYERS family: Walter Dean Myers and Christopher Myers
The PINKNEY family: Jerry Pinkney and Brian Pinkney
The ROCKWELL family: Harlow and Anne Rockwell and Lizzy Rockwell

The Lion and the Mouse - Jerry Pinkney

Little Brown, 2009
For: everyone!
Rating: 5
Endpapers: African scene full of animals
2010 Caldecott WINNER

Wowee. Zowee.
I really enjoy retellings of Aesop's Fables.
I adore Jerry Pinkney's work.
I'm fond of wordless books. (Even the cover has no words - only a large painnting of the lion.)

Here, without words except for the SOUNDS of owl (who who, screech), lion (grrr, rroarr), mouse (scratch, squeak), and jeep (putt-putt) we watch this timeless story unfold. Mouse, while escaping from owl, gets caught by lion, who decides to let him go. Hunters snare the lion, hes roars are heard by jmouse, who chews him free.

It's absolutely marvelous!

The Moon Over Star - Dianna Hutts Aston

Illustrated by Jerry Pinkney
Published 2008
32 pages
Dial Books for Young Readers (Penguin)
$17.99
Rating: 4.5

Here's another picture book that incorporates a good story with great historical facts.

Mae (the future astronaut?) visits her grandparents' farm in STAR during the summer of 1969, and together they watch the Eagle take off and land on the moon, while listening to Walter Cronkite's voice on the news, and watching Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins take the first historic steps of the world's first moon mission. Dianna Aston and Jerry Pinkney make you feel THERE, with them. So many facts, so much imagination, dreaming, and reflection about the past and the future make this book a top read for this, the 40th anniversary of this first visit to the moon. 40 years!

President Obama read this book to second graders at a public school in Washington. There's a cool picture here. I would love to hear the discussion after he read it!