Urban Animals

No,  not pigeons, rats, or raccoons.  Urban Animals by Isabel Hill (Star Bright Books, 2009) is about animals in architecture, and it works as an introduction to architectural terms (like keystone, column, and bracket), as well as an I Spy book that might inspire you and your kids to look for the animals in your own built environment (or in a nearby city; author and photographer Isabel Hill found all of these animals in New York).

I like the design details of Urban Animals itself:  Colorful cartoon animals correspond to the mostly monochrome architectural ones, and coordinating accents (photo corners on the detail shots, the hand-printed font used for architectural terms) brighten things up.  The rhyming text (it's all in couplets) is relatively utilitarian.  Here's a typical double-page spread:

There's also an Architectural Glossary at the back of the book, helpfully keyed to a line drawing of a city block; and a list of "Animal Habitats" that gives the NYC street address (as well as the architects and construction dates) of the buildings featured in the book.

It's interesting to think about why a particular animal might have been incorporated into a building's design:  the cow on the Sheffield Farms Milk Plant makes sense, and so does my favorite, the squirrel on the Kings County Savings Bank, but what about the alligator on Liberty Tower?

[Local folks, check out the National Building Museum's Calendar of Events for animal sightings in Washington, DC.  I'll let you know if we spot any more!]

Middle Grade Gallery 4

So far the Middle Grade Gallery has only featured paintings from fantasy novels.  This week's description, however, is from a family story set in mid-twentieth century New York; it may even refer to an actual work of art (not the one pictured, which is Renoir's Girl with a Hoop, 1885).

[She] was always finding things that belonged to her in a special way, though ownership had nothing to do with it.  Now she had found the picture.  The catalogue told her that the picture was called The Princess, that it had been painted by someone named Jules Clairon in the year 1881.  In the picture a girl about [her] age was sitting on a garden wall and looking out over an enormous city.  She had a solemn little face: her long hair hung to the sash of her old-fashioned dress, and her high-heeled boots were buttoned almost to the knee.  Among the potted chrysanthemums at her foot sat a black poodle with a red bow on top of his head.  On either side the clipped plane trees were almost bare, and in the distance the huge city was spread in a dusky web of blue and gray.

This must be referring to the French artist Georges Jules Victor Clairin (1843-1919), although I can't find a painting of his online that fits this description.  I substituted Renoir's roughly contemporaneous Girl with a Hoop:  she has the same solemn face, long hair, and old-fashioned dress.  Sadly, no poodle.

Please leave a comment if you think you recognize the source of this description (or if you're an expert on Clairin).  And check back on Monday for the details!

The Shadows

The painting of the forest at night featured in last week's Middle Grade Gallery comes from Jacqueline West's debut novel, The Shadows (Volume 1 of The Books of Elsewhere; Dial, 2010).  It's one of several paintings--landscapes, portraits, genre scenes of stonemasons and laughing girls-- in the old house on Linden Street that serve as portals into a mysterious Elsewhere.

Enter Olive Dunwoody, the eleven-year-old daughter of two abstracted math professors who have just bought the house and its contents.  Olive, lonely and left to her own devices most of the time, senses almost immediately that the house is keeping secrets.  With the help of a pair of spectacles, three talking house cats (Horatio, the gigantic orange one, is my favorite) and her own determination to solve the mystery of the paintings and the people in them, she travels into--and out of--Elsewhere.  But if she's not careful, she may get trapped in a painting before she can stop the dark forces who created them...and live in them still.

I absolutely adored this book.  Starting with Olive, who's an extremely likable heroine--shy and awkward, but also imaginative, curious, and brave (lots of bookish girls will recognize themselves in her); her relationships with her parents, who are present if not exactly paying attention; and with Morton, a small annoying boy who's been trapped in a painting for a long time himself.  Plus the cats!

Then there's the house.  Who can resist an old stone Victorian, full of antique furniture and strange knicknacks?  Not I.  It's got an attic heaped with things, too; not to mention an overgrown garden that I hope Olive explores more thoroughly in one of the later books in the series.

Most of all, though, I love the mystery, and the mechanics, of The Shadows.  The paintings aren't just portals between the house and Elsewhere, they are Elsewhere.  The people there are mostly paintings, too--the scenes where Olive realizes this about Morton, and then later when he realizes it about himself, are especially memorable.  [For what this might look like, check out Alexa Meade's acrylics on flesh.]

A note about the book itself:  If I were to write a middle grade fantasy novel, I would want it to be as beautifully made (let alone written) as this one.  Poly Bernatene's black-and-white illustrations are fantastic, a perfect fit for the creepy/comic tone of the text; the endpapers, printed with empty frames, are the exact same shade of blue as the sky on the jacket; there's even a debossed pair of spectacles on the hardcover underneath.  It's all very satisfying.

The Shadows has been compared to Coraline, but really, I liked it even better.  Highly recommended!

[Review copy received from publisher at ALA; thank you so much!]

A Boy Named Giotto

We read A Boy Named Giotto by Paolo Guarnieri (illustrated by Bimba Landmann; FSG, 1999) at the National Gallery of Art yesterday, as part of the NGA's summer series Stories in Art (this year's theme is Explore Italy).  Inspired a legend about the artist's childhood, the story tells how the boy Giotto, with materials borrowed from the artist Cimabue, paints a sheep so convincingly that even her missing lamb is fooled and returns to Giotto's father's flock.  When Cimabue sees Giotto's painting of the sheep, he asks Giotto's father to let his son become Cimabue's apprentice, which eventually he does.

Landmann's elegant illustrations are likewise inspired by the work of Giotto, which is a daunting task; but not imitative, which never works anyway.  They evoke the early Renaissance, with its Byzantine grace and modern spirit.  I love the palette Landmann uses here as well, all rusts and ochres and gold.

Unfortunately, A Boy Named Giotto is out of print (my library doesn't even hold it anymore) so we haven't been able to reread it or look closely at the illustrations.  If you can find this one, it's worth it.  In gold (or at least gold leaf).

[Nonfiction Monday is at In need of chocolate this week.  Thanks!]