osprey_archer | Picture Book Monday: Green and I Wanna Iguana

Picture Book Monday returns! It's been a few weeks since we've repaired anything interesting, and I didn't want to bore you all with "and this week we repaired Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus YET AGAIN, I can't believe the publisher can't spring for a better binding."

Like seriously, these books are SO POPULAR and SO POORLY BOUND. Mo Willems should take a stand for decent bindings; he makes his publisher more than enough money to make some demands.

But this week! This week we got a bonanza of books to re-cover (which means taking the plastic cover off the dust jacket and putting a new plastic cover on; it makes the books look fresh and new), and two of them were perfectly charming.

First, Laura Vaccaro Seeger's Green, a Caldecott honor winner from a few years back which is simply a catalog of all the different tints and hues of green in the world. The Look Inside feature on Amazon doesn't really do justice to the excellence of this book, part of which lies in the pleasure of the die-cut pages. I'm not a big fan of books with cut-outs (admittedly, this is partly because they have usually been torn and battered by the time they reach me in mending), but they're not merely a gimmick here: they're a sort of comparative device.

(Maybe I should do a Caldecott project as a companion to my Newbery project? But Caldecott honor winners are so short comparatively speaking, it almost feels like cheating.)

And second (my favorite), Karen Kaufman Orloff's I Wanna Iguana, which is an exchange of letters (an epistolary picture book!) between a mother and her son about the son's burning desire for a pet iguana. The letters are funny and thoughtful and full of love without being at all cloying, and the illustrations - which show their prospective life with the iguana in it - are hilarious.