Best Children's Books of 2005

By Christopher Porterfield

Carolinda Clatter! By Mordicai Gerstein

If you are wondering what has become of children's books with the sweeping, mythic dimension of classic folktales, here is proof that the genre still has life in it. Gerstein's stirring story covers hundreds of thousands of years and a vast landscape; his illustrations rise to the realm of Chagall-like lyric fantasy. He tells of the earth's last giant, who, exhausted by his unrequited love for the moon, falls asleep and over the centuries becomes a mountain. In a town (Pupickton--from the Yiddish for belly button) built on his belly, the residents live in fear of waking him, until one day rambunctious little Carolinda does so. Sent to placate him, she sings a lullaby that soothes him into eternal sleep, after which her gift fosters a tradition of singing that makes the town famous. Gerstein's story lacks only one thing: an enterprising composer who can turn it into an opera.

Roaring Brook Press; $16.95

FOOD FOR THOUGHT By Saxton Freymann and Joost Elffers

Put together a cluster of endive, a curved squash and two strips of greens, and what do you have? Why, a duck. How about a cauliflower, a black olive and four stems? A sheep. A pineapple half and chunks of green pepper? A turtle. Those are what you get in Freymann's antic, ingenious sculptures of fruits and vegetables. Some of his creations are scarcely altered. It's amazing how easily a sweet potato morphs into a guinea pig, or bok choy into a fish. Others are more elaborate, as when he shapes bananas into the heads of giraffes, then a zebra and, yes, an airplane. The book has five sections in which Freymann's fancies illustrate shapes, colors, numbers, letters and opposites. His inventiveness never flags, nor will the reader's delight. Caution to parents: This book may give kids ideas about what to do with dinner besides eating it.

Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic; $14.95

ROSA By Nikki Giovanni Illustrated by Bryan Collier

On Dec. 1, 1955, "Mrs. Parks was having a good day," writes Giovanni at the start of her retelling of the Rosa Parks story. But, as most Americans know, that chilly, ordinary workday of an extraordinary seamstress in Montgomery, Ala., ultimately helped ignite the civil rights movement. Giovanni, a poet and black activist, keeps her evident moral outrage in check as she tells the tale of Parks' bus ride into history, maintaining the same firm, level tone that Parks did when she refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus to a white man. Parks, Giovanni writes, was tired. "She was tired of 'Colored' entrances, 'Colored' balconies, 'Colored' drinking fountains and 'Colored' taxis. She was tired of getting somewhere first and being waited on last. Tired of 'separate,' and definitely tired of 'not equal.'"

Collier's richly colored watercolors and collages, like Giovanni's text, portray an impassioned episode boldly but with dignified restraint. In light of Parks' death at age 92 in October, this book seems especially timely. But its message of quiet courage is timeless.

Henry Holt; $16.95

HOW DO DINOSAURS EAT THEIR FOOD? By Jane Yolen & Mark Teague

Yolen and Teague, whose How Do Dinosaurs ... ? books are becoming a popular series, begin with a catalog of mealtime malefactions that unfortunately will be familiar, at least in part, to any parent. Belches and makes rude noises. Fidgets and squirms in his chair. Bubbles his milk. Sticks beans up his nose. But the question mark is crucial. The authors answer the question of whether a dinosaur really eats this way by saying no, then showing a sequence of model dino decorum at the table: calm, polite and cheerful. "He never drops anything/ Onto the floor./ And after he's finished,/ He asks for some more." Whichever style young readers are tempted to emulate (you get one guess), they will be entertained by Yolen's neatly rhymed text and Teague's vividly delineated dino species--protoceratops, spinosaurus, quetzalcoatlus and so on, which are all shown again on the endpapers for handy reference. And for maximum portability, the book comes with a mini-paperback duplicate that will easily fit into tiny pockets.

Blue Sky Press/ Scholastic; $15.99

An Undone Fairy Tale

By Ian Lendler. Illustrated by Whitney Martin

Postmodernism comes to kid lit! But to children it will seem more like good subversive fun. The conceit is that the book's illustrator, Ned--who is often depicted hard at work--can't paint fast enough to stay ahead of the reader. So a cartoon stand-in for Lendler keeps turning up to urge the reader to slow down for Ned's sake and to please, please not turn the page yet. Now, what youngster can resist defying such a request? The narrative, a standard knight-rescuing-an-imprisoned-princess tale, unravels ridiculously as the overwhelmed Ned is forced to improvise. Tutus are substituted for missing armor, a giant pretzel replaces a dragon, and the hero falls through a hole in a half-drawn floor. Ultimately Ned quits, and a desperate Lendler runs out of the letter e as his book comes to th nd.

Simon & Schuster; $15.95

The Great Blue House By Kate Banks Pictures by Georg Hallensleben

It often seems that loud is every child's middle name, but this lovely book should tame the rowdiest tyke by dwelling on sound, not noise. The blue house is a summer place that, after the season ends and the suitcases bang closed and the car doors slam shut, falls silent. Or does it? Banks' poetic text and Hallensleben's richly impastoed paintings guide us through the deserted rooms, evoking the dripping of a kitchen faucet, the buckling and crackling of frost on the windows, the ruffling of a cat shaking snowflakes from its fur, even the silence of a bird sitting on its nest in the loft. At length the patter of rain heralds spring, and soon children's shouts and the clump of feet on the back stairs start another season. At the same time a secondary theme blossoms. Not only does the house return to life, but also a new cycle of nature begins. Again, the sounds tell the story: "Kittens are meowing. Fledglings are chirping. And a new baby cries. Summer has returned to the great blue house."

Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $16 DON'T BE SILLY, MRS. MILLIE! By Judy Cox Illustrated by Joe Mathieu

What could be more gratifying to kindergartners than correcting their teacher's "mistakes"? When Mrs. Millie tells her charges to hang up their goats and get out their paper and penguins, they loudly and gleefully put her right, as little readers surely will too. ("We know what you mean," the kindergartners yell.) Half the fun comes from seeing Mrs. Millie's misnomers made literal in Mathieu's drawings. One depicts a perplexed primate who finds himself serving as filler in a "gorilla cheese sandwich"; another shows the indignant weasel on whom the kids happily daub their paintings. As the school day ends, the kids have a snack of parrot sticks and quackers, then say butterfly and get on the octopus to ride home. Cox, herself a kindergarten teacher, knows that more than contusion reigns when 4- and 5-year-olds are teased into sorting out sound-alike words. In fact, if you recognize how much verbal comprehension is conveyed by the jokes and see that Mrs. Millie is silly like a fox, go to the head of the glass.

Marshall Cavendish; $14.95

DIARY OF A SPIDER By Doreen Cronin Pictures by Harry Bliss

Nothing like a diary to give you a glimpse of somebody's inner life. In this diverting follow-up to 2003's Diary of a Worm, also by Cronin and Bliss, Spider confesses his greatest fears--Daddy Longlegs, vacuum cleaners and people with big feet--and shares his grandpa's secret of longevity: Never fall asleep in a shoe. He talks about his unlikely friendship with Fly, whose forebears used to be the enemies of spiders. "Things are different now," says Spider, although Fly sometimes accidentally gets stuck in his web, to the horror of Fly's mother. Worm, his other best friend and fellow diarist, makes amusing cameo appearances. On sleepovers at Worm's house, Spider is revolted by the leaves and rotten tomatoes served for dinner. Conversely, Worm is disgusted when Spider molts. Spider, much like his young readers, is a little guy trying to learn how to navigate the world. He dreams of soaring on the wind to faraway places like his grandpa, who one day floats across the ocean to Paris. But happily, he is solidly grounded in everyday mischief, as when he laughs about grossing out people by spinning a huge sticky web on a water fountain or when he confides that "butterflies taste better with a little barbecue sauce."

Joanna Cotler Books/HarperCollins; $15.99

The Duck And the Owl By Hanna Johansen Illustrated by Kaethi Bhend

Colorful, splashy illustrations are great, of course, but give this book credit for trusting children to appreciate exquisitely detailed pen-and-ink drawings as well. And for treating kids, in typography and design, to a truly elegant piece of bookmaking. The fable-like story is a prickly dialogue between a duck and an owl, who, although they see virtues in each other, can't quite become friends because each fails to understand why the other does things in such an odd way. The duck likes to glide back and forth in the water; the owl prefers sitting high up in a birch tree. The duck eats weeds from the bottom of the pond; the owl hunts small animals in the woods. The duck sleeps at night, the owl during the day. Eventually both realize, as the owl puts it, "I don't do things the wrong way, I do them a different way, and it works out fine." There is a moral here about tolerance and understanding, but it is all the more eloquent for remaining unspoken.

David R. Godine; $17.95

LEONARDO, THE TERRIBLE MONSTER By Mo Willems

Tony has more teeth. Eleanor is bigger. Hector is weirder. As monsters go, Leonardo is simply terrible: he can't scare anyone. And no wonder. In Willems' witty, angular renderings, he is an adorable little terror. But he has a plan--to find "the most scaredy-cat kid in the whole world and scare the tuna salad out of him!" That leads him to Sam. After Leonardo performs a full repertoire of growls, glares and gesticulations, Sam bawls. Not because of Leonardo, alas, but because of a monumental toddler's hard-luck saga that he tells the monster: "... and I got so mad I kicked the table and I stubbed my toe on the same foot that I hurt last month when I accidentally slipped in the bathtub after I got soap in my eyes trying to wash out the bird poo that my brother's cockatoo ..." This is Leonardo's defining moment. He decides to switch to something he can be good at: being a friend. Willems, who wrote for Sesame Street, works in a large format and makes striking use of blank space. But there is nothing empty about his sentiments.

Hyperion; $16.99

Just One More From an Old Friend

Playwright, singer, songwriter, cartoonist, Shel Silverstein was a jack-of-all-trades and the master of one--and the one was writing children's books. His freewheeling, provocative stories (The Giving Tree) and books of poetry (Where the Sidewalk Ends, A Light in the Attic), illustrated with his quirky line drawings, have sold more than 25 million copies. Thus a new Silverstein title is a signal event, especially if it comes six years after his death.

Runny Babbit was among Silverstein's papers when he died at 68. He had been working on it for more than 20 years. His son Matthew and other family members finally agreed to its publication this year. The book is another collection of poems, but with a difference. All of them, like the title, are built on spoonerisms, or pairs of words in which the first letters are transposed. Example: "Runny had to bake a tath/ Before they'd sive him gupper./ He got so tungry in the hub,/ He ate the rat of mubber."

It is no surprise that Silverstein spent two decades honing these verses, says Antonia Markiet, his editor at HarperCollins Children's Books. "He was very much a perfectionist. He spent an incredible amount of time on every phrase, every word." For all its ingenious variations, Runny Babbit is essentially one joke repeated over 89 pages. But in short installments it offers prime fun for readers young and old--and a fond farewell from a beloved author. Or, as Runny puts it, "Bood-gye ... nor fow."

With reporting by Amy Lennard Goehner, Reported by Andrea Sachs/New York