Picture Books - Blog Posts

Claire here! I am back in the Kids store again at the bookstore. And the first thing I read yesterday morning was Vikki Vansickle’s new picture book. And I am so glad that JoAnn brought it over to me! (JoAnn, you have me hooked. If I Had A Gryphon is going to be my big story time book next week.) 

If I Had A Gryphon is written by Vikki Vansickle and illustrated by Cale Atkinson. It is about Sam, a young girl who has just gotten her first pet: a hamster. Sam thinks hamsters are not nearly as exciting as some of the mythological creatures she reads about in her books. So she starts thinking of some other pets that might be a bit more fun, but also perhaps a lot more work. Maybe hamsters aren’t so bad?

Ohmygoodness this book! I adore this for a multitude of reasons: the illustrations are adorable, there are mythological creatures everywhere, Vansickle’s rhymes are bouncing and delightful, and Sam is both whimsical and practical in an entirely enchanting way. Also that too cute kraken happily playing with a dismal blue whale and a sunken steam ship. That page cracked me up!

The mythological creatures in this picture book make me so so pleased. I loved mythology as a kid. I had all the giant collections of Greek and Egyptian myths I could get my hands on. And later I added Celtic, Norse, and Japanese myths to my collection as I found them. If there were beautiful illustrations, that made them all the better. Myths and the heroes, monsters and enchanted creatures depicted in them fed my imagination. And I have never entirely grown out of that phase. Vansickle makes me slightly nostalgic for those times when little 8 year old Claire was curled up on the couch with giant mythology books, much like Sam. And I really love that Vansickle and Atkinson are introducing these mythological characters to younger readers in such an accessible and fun way.

Vansickle’s rhymes are rhythmic and skip along as Sam considers what she could do with her more exciting pets and what their potential downfalls might be. The kraken one is honestly, pure gold. “If I had a kraken/ We’d swim and deep-sea dive/ But I would need a scuba suit/ In order to survive.”

Also Cale Atkinson’s illustrations just fill me with pink bubbly happiness. He manages to make manticores, kraken, jackalopes, and gryphons look equally joyful and cuddly. I just realized today that he also wrote and illustrated To the Sea, about a lonely boy named Tim who has to take a lost whale named Sam back to the ocean. (If you have not read it, you should, it is just as cute as If I Had A Gryphon.)

PLEASE go check out If I Had A Gryphon. You will love it. At the very least, it should make you giggle.

So these (and several others) I made a year ago for a project that went nowhere, but I had fun drawing them and I love circus themed stuff like, someone hire me to draw circus ppl and acrobats

StellaLuna, Archie, and other picture books

Many "kids books" don't have pictures, many " adult books" do. While an overuse of pictures can dumb-down the story the final picture in A Picture of Dorian Gray and the pictures of some of the mountain climbers and map of Everest in Into Thin Air created emphasis and added to the story. It's important also to note that while not always, "kids books" or picture books aren't actually always just for children.

I was probably too young to read the Archie comic books when I read them, as with most things I did with my parents. But at 11 or later at night there was little else at the newsstand, that's what was available and it worked to keep me occupied at a time long before smartphones or portable DVD players. A few years later books were used again as part of a reward system: 100 books and I could get a pet. These were good moves, while there is a fine line between bribing and inspiring, in this case I was inspired with that list being one of the biggest factors into reading all the very adult books I read today, even thou most of those books were ones that I knew were kids books even then when it took me less than an hour to read some.

StellaLuna was a story about a bat, and long story short, it’s about how who you love determines your family, the harms of trying to fit into a mould and is a stuffed animal that remains on my bed to this day. So really, let's stop hating the picture books, stop thinking those that do are dumb or bland, let's just stop being book-snobs. Picture books aren't low brow, and Shakespeare isn't the holy grail.