reading with zadiebooks for a little bookworm

Bob and Otto, by Robert O. Bruel. Illustrated by Nick Bruel.

A worm and a caterpillar find that they are quite different, but still friends.

Age Range: 2 years and up

Gotta Go! Gotta Go!, by Sam Swope. Illustrated by Sue Riddle.

A caterpillar is making her way to Mexico without knowing why or how to get there.

Age range: 2 years and up

The Caterpillar and the Polliwog, written and illustrated by Jack Kent

A boastful caterpillar inspires a caterpillar to try to turn into a butterfly.

Age range: 2 1/2 years and up

Tadpole’s Promise, by Jeanne Willis. Illustrated by Tony Ross.

A tadpole and a caterpillar fall in love and promise each other that they’ll never change. *One of the best endings ever.*

Age range: 3 years and up

I’ve been thinking of this sweet little (defunct) blog a lot this week. In the two years since I last posted I’ve amassed a large collection of library receipts with lists of the titles of the books we’ve checked out. On each receipt I’ve circled the names of the books we enjoyed and the date so that I could someday find them again. As my second child, Lincoln, has become trustworthy around books with paper pages, I’ve started to turn back to the old receipts from when Zadie was a toddler.

Finding and choosing good books at the library is nearly impossible with two kids running around. So I thought I’d fire up the blog again and use it more as a cataloging tool than as a place for detailed reviews. My plan is to post the titles of books we liked along with a short description and a suggested age range. And maybe it’ll make some parent’s life a little easier during the next trip to the library. Let’s see how it goes.

Olivia is like Oprah at this point: she’s everywhere. She has a web presence, a TV show, even a cookie-making kit. So maybe it’s silly to be writing about a character who is so well known. But the original “Olivia” is kind of like “Wicked”–it’s popular for good reasons.

One of the greatest reliefs of graduating from board books is that the characters in the books you’re reading occasionally have personalities. Up until now, the characters in Zadie’s books have behaved as you’d expect them to: “Vincent stayed up late and felt very tired,” or “I’m having some milk…yummy!” I’m not sure if board books are written this way out of an utter lack of creativity, or out of the limitations of the format, or whether it’s actually just good to expose babies to the norms of human emotions. Whatever the reason, it feels fantastic to moving beyond the “Baby happy/Baby sad” kind of thing to the plucky, smug, imaginative antics of Olivia. She fights naps and bedtime. She imagines herself to be an architect, a dancer, a painter. She’s willful, loving, and completely charming.
One of our favorite part of the book is a Richard Scarry-esque two-page spread showing Olivia trying on all her clothes. The text is simple (“Olivia gets dressed. She has to try on everything.”) but there is a lot to look for. Zadie loves to try to find Olivia in her bathing suit, or her turtleneck, or with her backpack. Some of the concepts (e.g. wanting to be left alone) might not be familiar to toddlers yet, but others, like confronting rules about where and when one can paint, are. And with that, I’m going to attempt to scrub the green crayon marks off of our oven door.