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Caldecott Monday: Locomotive
Feb. 26th, 2018 07:27 amI quite enjoyed Brian Floca’s Locomotive! It’s about the transcontinental railway and you know I’m always up for anything involving trains. (There are train tracks just past the library where I work. I don’t run to the library window and cry “Train! Train!” like the little kids do sometimes when it passes, but it’s always a pleasant break to hear the whistle and the rattle of the wheels rolling past.)
I realize that the Caldecott is awarded for the sake of the pictures, but the thing that really struck me about this book is the use of typefaces, which you can only see a little bit in the Amazon preview, unfortunately. But there’s the general narrative of the book, which is a sort of free verse poem about trains, and then you’ve got words that are sound effects, basically - the sound of the hammers pounding the spikes into the track, the clang of the wheels and the whistle of the steam - and these are bigger and bolder and sometimes in that old-timey saloon font - and it just gives the book a lovely sense of atmosphere, so that you can almost hear the train as you’re reading.
***
And now I’ve got just two more books to go in the Caldecott project! I read the 2016 & 2017 winners as the project was ongoing, so there’s just the 2015 winner, The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend, which is about an imaginary friend who doesn’t have a child and sets out on a quest to find one - I see no way that this book could be anything but 100% charming - and then the 2018 winner, Wolf in the Snow, which frankly looks engineered to appeal directly to my interests.
What next? I’ve been toying with the idea of reading the Newbery Honor books - probably not all of them; there are an awful lot and I suspect most of the older ones will be hard to get a hold of, because after 1923 the iron portcullis of US copyright law falls and therefore they’re not available online. Why are you like this, copyright law? (This is a rhetorical question; IIRC it’s something to do with Disney.)
But I’ve had really good luck finding books I love among the Newbery Honor books in the past (more so than the winners themselves, actually, although one must bear in mind that there are simply more honor books overall), so it seems like it would be worthwhile to give it a go anyway.
I realize that the Caldecott is awarded for the sake of the pictures, but the thing that really struck me about this book is the use of typefaces, which you can only see a little bit in the Amazon preview, unfortunately. But there’s the general narrative of the book, which is a sort of free verse poem about trains, and then you’ve got words that are sound effects, basically - the sound of the hammers pounding the spikes into the track, the clang of the wheels and the whistle of the steam - and these are bigger and bolder and sometimes in that old-timey saloon font - and it just gives the book a lovely sense of atmosphere, so that you can almost hear the train as you’re reading.
***
And now I’ve got just two more books to go in the Caldecott project! I read the 2016 & 2017 winners as the project was ongoing, so there’s just the 2015 winner, The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend, which is about an imaginary friend who doesn’t have a child and sets out on a quest to find one - I see no way that this book could be anything but 100% charming - and then the 2018 winner, Wolf in the Snow, which frankly looks engineered to appeal directly to my interests.
What next? I’ve been toying with the idea of reading the Newbery Honor books - probably not all of them; there are an awful lot and I suspect most of the older ones will be hard to get a hold of, because after 1923 the iron portcullis of US copyright law falls and therefore they’re not available online. Why are you like this, copyright law? (This is a rhetorical question; IIRC it’s something to do with Disney.)
But I’ve had really good luck finding books I love among the Newbery Honor books in the past (more so than the winners themselves, actually, although one must bear in mind that there are simply more honor books overall), so it seems like it would be worthwhile to give it a go anyway.
