There are so many lists of “great books” everywhere for us parents to pay attention to, yet somehow a lot of the illustrations and topics don’t really nab my personal admiration or attention. Maybe it’s the snob in me, the 90’s analogue college film student, or the LaGuardia High School cartoonist. What I love about this particular list (The New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2015) is that the books really are cool, beautiful, eloquent, true works of art, and educational on a whole other level. They seem crafted and personal, as if your child would be lucky to enter their worlds. The list is compiled by an independent panel of judges every year who bring our attention to their favorites based on artistic merit. “This year’s judges were Frank Viva, Monica Edinger and Marjorie Ingall. Viva has written and illustrated several acclaimed books for children, including “Along a Long Road” — a previous Times Best Illustrated winner — “Outstanding in the Rain” and “Young Frank, Architect.” He is a frequent cover artist for The New Yorker and the managing director of the design firm Viva & Co. Edinger has been an elementary- and middle-school educator for more than 25 years and currently teaches fourth grade at the Dalton School in New York City. She is also the author of the picture book “Africa Is My Home” and blogs about children’s books at Educating Alice. Ingall is a columnist for Tablet and a frequent contributor of children’s book reviews to The Times and other publications. Her book “Mamaleh Knows Best: What Jewish Mothers Do to Raise Successful, Creative, Empathetic, Independent Children” will be published next year.” Some of this artwork is so good, I’d want the book just for myself, to flip through at my leisure (leisure? What’s that? I have two small kids. Might as well flip through them together, then). If money or apartment space is tight, why not see if they’re at your local library, or suggest that they get them? Here are just a few examples:
Big Bear Little Chair Written and illustrated by Lizi Boyd. This ingenious take on the “opposites” book shows the youngest children that big, little and tiny are all in how you look at things. Using just black, white and a velvety gray, with a bit of red, Boyd’s delightful cut paper compositions juxtapose the large and the small in unexpected ways: a “big meadow” is big because it’s full of small flowers; a “big seal” towers over a “tiny castle” that’s made of sand. 32 pp. Chronicle Books. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 3 to 5)
Leo: A Ghost Story By Mac Barnett. Illustrated by Christian Robinson. Leo, a little ghost drawn touchingly by Robinson as an improbably sweet and hopeful-looking crayoned outline, feels unwanted in the house he is haunting. So he moves to the city, where he befriends a girl who thinks he’s strictly imaginary. After Leo thwarts a robbery, his real — that is, ghostly — status is affirmed. Our reviewer, Marjorie Ingall, praised Robinson’s “exciting” art. “I love the palette of ‘Leo,’” she wrote. “Black, white, gray and various shades of moody blue, in a mix of acrylic paint and chunky construction-paper collage.” 52 pp. Chronicle Books. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 3 to 5)
Sidewalk Flowers By JonArno Lawson. Illustrated by Sydney Smith. “Something to treasure,” our reviewer, Carmela Ciuraru, called this dazzling wordless book. As a girl and her father walk home through city streets, she notices flowers sprouting in unexpected places. She picks them, accumulating a bouquet that she distributes to a dog, a dead bird, a homeless man and finally, back home, her sleeping toddler sibling. In Smith’s elegant and moving drawings, as Ciuraru wrote, “the only pop of color on the first page is the girl’s bright red hoodie, redolent of Peter’s snowsuit in Ezra Jack Keats’s ‘The Snowy Day.’ More color suffuses these pages as the pair gets closer to home.” 26 pp. Groundwood Books/House of Anansi Press. $16.95. (Picture book; ages 3 to 8)
The Tiger Who Would Be King By James Thurber. Illustrated by JooHee Yoon. Thurber’s 1956 comic fable about a power-mad tiger who starts a deadly war is vibrantly illustrated by Yoon in a dense, blocky print style, all in an electric red, a cool blue-green, black and white. Each page teems with evocative images of animal life. The effect is ferocious and ravishing, capturing the beastliness of war along with emotions that include pride, boredom, shock and sorrow. 40 pp. Enchanted Lion Books. $18.95. (All ages)
There are more to see, so check it out!
~Rebecca Conroy, Editor