Cat Heaven
by Cynthia Rylant: What a wonderful place for cats! and I adore the folk style paintings of cats enjoying their eternal play.
The Secret Life of Walter Kitty
written by Barbara Hicks, illustrated by Dan Santat: A take-off on the James Thurber short story, Walter Kitty goes by his secret name: Fang!
Chewy Louie
by Howie Schneider: If you've ever had a puppy, you will love how Chewy Louie chews through the whole house!
Chester
by Melanie Watt. Another cat on a mission, Chester keeps re-writing the story that Melanie is trying to tell.
Olivia
by Ian Falcolner. If you haven't read any of the Olivia books yet, you are missing out!
The Three Pigs
by David Wiesner. Wiesner takes the story of the three pigs and turns it inside out, as the pigs escape the pages of the book to take care of the big bad wolf.
What picture books make you laugh?
So, I LOVE picture books and have read a lot of them while I was working on my dissertation. We have the largest collection of international children's books in the country here on the ground floor of our college, so all of my classes had lots of opportunities for browsing great picture books. I particularly like multicultural books (my dissertation was on bilingual books from small presses), books about art, ABC books, and books with awesome artwork. A Is for Art: An Abstract Alphabet
is an incredible alphabet book like none I've ever seen before. Johnson, who is a fantastic artist, doesn't portray apples and zebras -- each letter is a painting that uses that letter in really creative ways. For example, the letter F is a painting of "Fourteen hundred and fifty-five fake French fries were flipped, flicked, and flung onto a full-size field of faint fuchsia." WOW! I can't imagine how he thought up all these pieces, much less created them. Johnson also wrote Alphabet City, where he created paintings of normal city scenes that contained letters hidden in them.
