I’m all for making full use of the local public library. But there comes a time, after checking the same title out over and over and over and OVER, to just buy the dang thing.
So, when I once again found myself searching for Adam Rex’s Unstoppable (Chronicle Books, 2020) and Jason Chin’s Your Place in the Universe (Neal Porter, 2020), I realized the time had come to own these two (totally different but equally excellent in their own right) books.
Allyn Johnston of Beach Lane Books says that picture books are a form of theater in which adults get to perform for the beloved children in their lives. If a book is effective, the reader looks like a rockstar, and everyone wants to experience it over and over. Well, I can tell you no other book is more fun to read to my children than Unstoppable. It cracks all of us up, every time. And it packs an important lesson about American lawmaking to boot. Actually, that’s the funniest part. Don’t believe me? Buy the dang book. (Or check it out from the library a million times and then buy it.)
BONUS: if you think it sounds fun to read the word craburtlebird out loud, just wait for doozy on the last spread.
In Your Place in the Universe, Jason Chin somehow manages to make a book about measurements engaging and beautiful, even tear-jerking if I’m honest. Each turn of the page introduces a grander scale of the world, from the average eight-year-old kid to ostriches to the cosmic web. My favorite part is when the vast journey through space returns to that group of eight-year-old kids. That’s where the tears usually come in. Want to know why? You know what to do.
Bonus: Jason Chin delivers his signature metanarrative (metaillustration?), in which my kids immediately have something in common with those kids on the page: they’re holding the same book. That’s my kids’ favorite part.
