Authors and illustrators never cease to amaze us with very original and fun proposals that make us want to go home quickly, cover ourselves with a blanket on the sofa and dedicate hours to books to unravel everything they offer us. From this start of 2023 (and some from the end of 2022, why not) we have selected some that have particularly caught our attention and that make up the showcase of our Tales that count for this end of February.
Something is wrong with these authors with geometry, because in this realm everything is a matter of angles, quadrilaterals, lines and other geometric figures. With them they have created Érase una forma, a fairy tale where “once upon a time” takes us into an amazing kingdom where soft, rounded and curved shapes have no place. At first glance it might seem like a book dedicated to geometry for children, but nothing could be further from the truth. This is a kingdom, with a king and queen, princes and princesses, subjects and knights and an ending according to the "they lived happily and ate partridges". But the special thing about this reign is that a very strict geometric principle prevails: the king and queen only allow their subjects to be made up of straight lines and acute angles. But what happens when their own children don't follow the rule of the kingdom and can't get their ways to fit the official standards? What if the suitors also do not conform to the canons of straight lines and sharp angles that are difficult to deal with? The triangle is the magnificent and surprising answer to everything.
This literary diversion, where geometric figures come to life, has the stamp of the French studio Cruschiform, founded in 2007 precisely to experiment, explore and transgress the limits of work, something that also matches the way of working of the well-known French illustrator Gazhole for its strange characters and universes. Also in Catalan.
Have you ever been tempted to switch paths and see what happens? Not to get carried away by the routine and improvise? Little children don't know routine but they do know imagination and I don't think they are as surprised as adults by this bus, which, dreaming, dreaming, reaches extraordinary dimensions. All thanks to the decision of this bus driver, who that Tuesday did not want to follow the custom of each day. He took his double-decker bus and after taking his usual passengers -the businessman, the mother, the schoolchildren...- he decided to change the route. Nobody complained. They went anywhere. And the magnificent thing about that decision was seeing how many people there are in the world wanting to go anywhere, wanting adventure, to break the routine. And what began as a double-decker bus, reached a hundred, and this adventure story became pure architecture. I wish the bus would also pass through our newsroom. We would go safely on the hundred-decker bus.
What a beautiful way to remember our grandparents without remembering them! Without putting them on a pedestal, or turning them into heroes, or making a virtue of all their actions. Because in the mere fact of living all this is already implicit. This story is a beautiful metaphor, that of a turtle, who is at the same time a grandfather, with turtle eyes, turtle patience and even with his shell. And while the words are fixed on the elongated pages of this Tortoise, the little reptiles roam freely playing with words, figures and blank spaces. Everything speaks of wisdom, calm, longevity, but also loss, memory and black holes. So much is said with so little!
The publishing house A buen paso has completed 15 years of existence and begins its birthday with the edition of this wonderful proposal that in an adult reading could well represent the limits that we foolishly impose on ourselves or how antisocial we can become. But what will the children of The Builder of Walls think, having found an ideal and wonderful place in the forest, and is not determined to share it with anyone? His obsession with preserving his place is so great that he will begin to build walls around him until the situation reaches the absurd. Luckily there is always someone or something that makes us open our eyes. The weight of the narration falls into the hands of the Argentine cartoonist and illustrator Decur (Guillermo Decurgez), who with drawings loaded with color takes us to that privileged corner where echoes of Liniers resound.
Who said that zero is nothing? It's a powerful number, and not just because following any integer makes it ten times greater. Zero is the number of bones that allow an octopus to slip through any site and zero is also the daylight that the neighbors of Longyearbyen, in Norway, have during two weeks of winter. Octopuses have zero bones is a parade of curiosities always based on a number. After zero, one: a heart, a single star in our universe... And if we place zero after one, we can talk about ten: ten fingers, ten legs with which hermit crabs are peeling. .. Thus, with whole numbers and playing with the powerful zeros, the authors parade the 200 different languages spoken in Madrid, the 3,000 times per hour that a bear's heart beats most of the year or the 3,000 years that it has Grizzly Giant, the most popular giant sequoia in Yosemite National Park, in California, with 3,000 years of life. Our life and our world is made up of numbers and discovering them is one of the most magnificent games proposed to us in this book. Also in Catalan.
Since the possibility of incorporating QR codes has been included in books, there are many authors who have explored these possibilities, giving reading a sometimes interesting plus. In the book that concerns us, Stories with confusion, the QR is an essential part of the story, because it would be its final result. And it is that these Stories with confusion is about music and some stories around pieces that became famous. But the Catalan musician and author, an expert in ancient music, Oriol Garcia Molsosa, has allowed himself certain licenses – or as he himself says, some “filthy lies” – to add sauce to the narratives.
Thus, he tells us how the composer Henry Purcell succeeded in the king's request to do a viola da gamba concert when he didn't even know how to hold the instrument, or how the incredible voice of soprano Nellie Melba singing the aria from the opera La Verdi's traviata led to the creation of the Peach Melba dessert by chef Auguste Escoffier. Scarlatti's cat Pulcinella or Benny Goodman's suitcase are also great protagonists of these musical and well-tuned stories. Also in Catalan.
Now that we have just passed the Carnival, it is good for us to introduce you to this special owl, a Super Owl, wow, he is the master of disguise masters. But his versatility has nothing to do with the desire to party, but with the desire to eat. He is hungry, and he tries to deceive his possible prey with funny camouflage that doesn't end up being useful for his objective. This is how the super little owl goes from being a carrot to an ornamental fountain, if not a fluffy mother sheep. Can you think of those who want to eat the owl with these costumes? Just tell you that in this charming tale no animal is harmed.
From the United Kingdom comes an original series that has been widely accepted among the little ones in the house. More than two and a half million copies sold prove it, which is not little, although generally we are not seduced by the figures. But the truth is that we have allowed ourselves to be seduced by these healthy protagonists, who mess up every time they can in the supermarket. Supertata is a potato in the purest style of heroines who has her worst enemy in a frozen pea.
Vegetables are rarely the protagonists of the stories that are told and when they do it is, almost 90% of the time, to teach us a lesson about how healthy they are. Here we do not know if its authors thought of improving the child-vegetable relationship, because it is the least of it. The stories are entertaining, funny and raised without further pretense. We love Supertata but still don't like broccoli or Brussels sprouts, for example. After a first installment of presentation, Supertata continues its collection with The Catastrophic Carnival, ideal for these days of carnival hangover, and will continue with The Valley of Death and Run, vegetables, run! Also in Catalan.
These Animals look like they came straight out of a poster from the sixties. Not in vain the creator of it, the Swedish illustrator Ingela P. Arrhenius is known for her designs between naive and retro, highly influenced by the graphic art of the fifties and sixties, in addition to the fact that she began her journey in the world of advertising. . This is how the pages of these Animals could be cut out and hung on the walls of any home, and assemble a beautiful collage with the rooster, the wolf, the snake, the bear, the elephant or the flamingo. Meerkats and hiccups are priceless and the back cover is a miniature showcase of these 32 colorful animals. Animals that on the other hand we already know, but in a different format, since it was the first book that came to us in Spain from the Swedish creator. Also in Catalan.
The Basque and Catalan illustrators Amaia Arrazona and Marta Puig (Lyona) sign the first two issues of a new collection of cloth books for babies where illustration also takes the floor for the little ones. Soft books that invite to be touched and with bright colors to capture attention, but also with a narrative content that condenses key moments in the life of a baby. The first, in Te quiero, does so through the lives of the animals: the mother rabbit and her babies; the elephant in the bathroom with her son, the turtles playing in the mother's shell... The second uses the mother's gaze to record the happiest moment she lives with her baby: walking, in the bathroom, playing ... Proposals that we echo for their artistic quality. Also in Catalan.
"One day, looking at the garden from the window, I saw a lonely chicken, going round and round aimlessly. I began to think about her life, her loneliness, her destiny. And so, the idea of writing about a chicken, so that children would learn to see in animals an intimate life, a life of their own, worthy of respect and understanding". This is how Clarice Lispector herself referred to The intimate life of Laura, a children's story where only the use of the word intimate gives a lot of itself and that the Brazilian author wrote for her son in 1974 (Club Editor is now publishing a new version Catalan).
Lispector plunges into the daily life of Laura the hen, turning an a priori image without much content into a world rich in reflections. Lispector writes as if he were thinking, or as if he were telling this story to his son, perhaps sitting at the table gnawing on a chicken leg. What will happen when he gets to the end and hears that Laura ended up in her mistress's pot? A narrative that without taking any sides and with a lot of humor, raises the relationship between animals and humans and, of course, the food chain. We just hope that no one, anywhere in the world, will consider rewriting Lispector for calling a chicken a donkey.
