Wild rumpus

I can’t draw. You wouldn’t want me on your Pictionary team. I also have a fifteen-month-old, so tushy humor is big right now. For these reasons, Brian Snyder and Alexis Moniello’s Everything Butt Art at the Zoo (Madbrook, May) caught my eye. “What can you draw with a butt? Everything!” Starting with a flattened-looking W (i.e., bum shape), the authors demonstrate, step by step, how to sketch fifteen different zoo animals, from a simple-ish six-step snake to a more involved twelve-step lion. A lot of the fun is seeing where the butt shape will take you; for almost all of the animals, the starting-point wiggly line doesn’t end up forming the rear. Sometimes it’s paws, sometimes cheeks (on the face, that is), sometimes a big, wide grin.

There’s no way kids won’t think this is funny, and it does get them thinking, between giggles, about shapes and forms. The fun continues on the website, and it looks like an app is on the way. Visual art is taken out of the museum and plopped right into the zoo—just where kiddos might want to find it.

—Elissa Gershowitz

Bonjour, Monsieur Tullet!

Hervé Tullet—the French author, illustrator, and ad agency art director known as the “Prince of Preschool”—has been popping up all over the office recently.

Tullet’s new book Press Here directs readers to press, rub, shake, and blow on colorful dots which then “transform” with the page turn. Chronicle’s been promoting Press Here with an adorable book trailer starring a group of kids who shriek in joy as the book “responds” to their touch—the brightly colored circles grow, shrink, slide, change color, or multiply from page to page. Like the kids in the trailer, I love how interaction and imagination bring the book to life in my hands.

Phaidon Press just published six board books from Tullet’s "The Game of…" series. The Game of Mix and Match and The Game of Mix-up Art are your standard flip-the-flaps books; the reader can choose to either seek out pieces of a complete picture or mix different shapes and patterns. The Game of Finger Worms is more story than game; after drawing smiling “finger worm” faces on my fingers, I had a Thumbelina-esque experience popping my pointer fingers through the holes in each page and wiggling them around the world of the story. The Game of Let’s Go! and The Game of Light are slightly more abstract and may require adult help (Light involves holding the book at an odd angle and projecting shapes on a wall with a flashlight). My personal favorite is The Game of Patterns, in which opposing pages contain what looks like an identical collection of images, but closer examination reveals subtle differences. This would be an excellent (and durable!) book to have in the car or travel bag. For more on “The Game Of…” books, see Betsy Bird’s in-depth review on Fuse #8.

Tullet’s The Book with a Hole (Abrams, May) is a “zany” activity and coloring book with a die-cut hole in its center. Readers can “crumple up a sheet of paper, make a ball, and play basketball” on one page; other pages encourage kids to “dress up” as “king of the castle” with their faces through the hole or to build a skyscraper to fit in the hole. As with all of Tullet’s creations, combining imagination with book interaction is the main goal, which is entertaining for readers of all ages.

—Cindy Ritter

"I'll clean up my act when I'm good and ripe!"

Karl Beckstrand's bizarrely funny picture book Bad Bananas (Premio, June) shows how good bananas go wrong. Fresh from the grocery store, they're sweet and "conform nicely to the bunch," but before you know it they're "borrowing" the fruit bowl for joyrides and loitering in "dimly lit lunchboxes." The fair trade and organic labels of their innocent youth are replaced by tattoo-like stickers proclaiming Del Malo, Un-Organic, or Dull. When rival fruits try to stand up to these hoodlums, insults fly: "Your mother's a raisin!" Most of illustrator Jeff Faerber's illustrations style the bad apples bananas as gang-banger types or skate punks—but some go fully Dark Side, like a Darth Vader-ish villain and a pirate banana walking the plank into a frying pan.

Just when you think there's no hope—they're just a bad bunch—salvation appears in the form of banana-based recipes. Cookies, fruit salad, pancakes, and more give these bananas a second chance. I made "banana redemption muffins" (with the "optional" chocolate chips, of course) and brought them into the office. A little dense (probably from my forgetting the baking powder rather than any defect in the recipe), they were still delicious, and an excellent use for the overripe bananas stinking up my kitchen. And while I can't say my baking received "four stars from The Banana Post," I'll take an appreciative "mmm" from The Horn Book staff any day.

—Katie Bircher

Snow day seek-and-find fun

It's looking like we'll have a snow day again tomorrow, so we're loading up on projects to take home. I've got a stack of novels, audio books, and blog possibilities set aside that I probably wouldn't get through in a week of snow days, but hope springs eternal, right?

Two new picture puzzle collections from Candlewick offer a nice distraction. Where's Waldo? The Phenomenal Postcard Book features the eponymous hero in 30 postcards. Beloved, bespectacled Waldo appears in settings ranging from Dracula's dinner party to a Hollywood movie premier to a sinking pirate ship. There's one for every correspondent and every occasion -- if you can stop searching long enough to actually mail the thing.

I keep mixing up the characters of activity book MoshiMoshiKawaii: Where Is Strawberry Moshi? with the dessert mochi. Can you blame me, given the dumpling-shaped animals that populate Moshi town? Strawberry Moshi (named for her strawberry-print ensemble, not her flavor) is looking for her boyfriend, Super Moshi. But due to the huge number of Moshis, and all their different outfits, she needs help. The seek-and-find puzzles and mazes are good for kids too young for the more complex Waldo puzzles, even if they do sometimes feel like a book-long ad for MoshiMoshi merch. (OMG, Moshi activities online!!)

While Waldo, a long-time friend, might get preference for my snow day reading breaks, the bizarrely cute Moshi are growing on me. And making me hungry.

-- Katie Bircher

P.S. Kitty says Stephen Savage's Where's Walrus? (Scholastic, pubbing today -- click for brilliant trailer) has "a flipper up on that guy in the striped shirt." Look for her review in the March/April issue of the magazine.

Outside the lines

Lefty press Reach & Teach has published Sometimes the Spoon Runs Away with Another Spoon, a coloring book by Jacinta Bunnell and Nathaniel Kusinitz. The "tea, trains and tiaras for everyone!" message throughout is winningly lighthearted, even if such jokes as "Marriage is so gay" (illustrated with a wedding cake topped by two brides) are overcomplicated for the little kids the coloring book is ostensibly aimed at. Recalling similarly aimed titles published in the 1970s by alternative presses like Lollipop Power, Sometimes the Spoon goes further than A Train for Jane or even Heather Has Two Mommies in its playful questioning of gender roles: while princesses building rocket ships has been more normalized than this book seems to think, Grumpy in Snow White's heels does provide an edge. I'm not sure the pictures, droll but too fine-lined for crayons, beg to be colored, but I suspect that's not completely the point anyway.

-- Roger Sutton