Tag Archives: Picture Book

I (Don’t) Like Snakes!

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Nicola Davies Do you like snakes? Have you met The Dude (resident snake at Civic Centre Resource Library)? He’s adorable and is sure to change your mind about snakes, if your answer to the first question was “no”! If you’re not quite up to using exposure to get you over your fear of snakes, then maybe this book will do the trick: I (Don’t) Like Snakes by Nicola Davies (who is also the author of Poop, Tiny Creatures, Extreme Animals, and Just Ducks!, to name a few), illustrated by Luciano Lozano.

This is kind of an odd book, in that I’m not sure whether it’s supposed to fall within the picture book market or the junior non-fiction one, because while there’s a story to it and it’s definitely a book filled with illustrations, Davies also includes lots of information about snakes, from the way they move around to how they molt their skin. One thing’s for sure though: the illustrations are adorable. And! The moral of the story, I think, is not only that snakes are awesome, though they are (maybe in both the colloquial and traditional sense of the word, at that), but that sometimes, hatred stems from ignorance, and that’s a takeaway message filled with hope and a healthy dose of optimism, because that’s something we can take into our own hands – all the more so at the library!

I’m going to move onto a number of books about snakes so that once I (Don’t) Like Snakes starts up your curiosity for all things anguine, you’ll be able to whet your appetite with some of the following.

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Search and Spot: Animals!

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EDIT: Take a look at the Vaughan Public Libraries COLOURING PAGES. Each branch has its own colouring sheets that portray a distinctive feature of the library, and you can print out and colour them in via that link! We would love to see your completed colourings!

Laura LjungkvistI haven’t really played spot-the-whatever games for a while now (probably since Where’s Waldo as a child, and even then not much), and whenever I have encountered them as an adult, I’ve found them to be a bit too easy to complete to truly engage with. This one though, is a treasure. Search and Spot: Animals! will keep you entertained (or frustrated) for maybe not quite hours, but at least a good half hour or so! And considering it’s a pretty slim book, I’d say it’s an amazing payoff. It really depends on how easily you can spot the animals, but I personally found it surprisingly difficult, which in turn made the experience surprisingly fun. I’d always get to, say, 9 out of 10 animals before having to start all over again because – fiddlesticks! I’ve gone through the entire 2-page spread, systematically, already! Or there’ll come a point where I start forgetting which of the insects I’ve found and which I haven’t, and, hey doesn’t this look like that insect? No, no, the pink part of its body is in another spot, and haven’t I already found it somewhere up here on the page? Now where’d that go?! Even the cover is a session of find-the-8-rabbits!

This is filed away under our junior section, but in light of the recent boom (or maybe not-so-recent? I don’t remember when those actually became popular…) of adult colouring books, I thought I should highlight these for all ages so we can satisfy our inner children!

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Why? and Terrible Things

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Nikolai PopovCross-posted with Kidzone, because I would that everyone read both these books.

There are books that you don’t expect to gut you. Least of all when you’re browsing through the junior picture book section. But here are a couple that will do the job quite nicely, whenever you’re in the mood for it.*

Why? is propelled mercilessly forward until the end (as though inertia should apply to the plot of this book, except there is nothing to stop it because the plot isn’t physical and encounters no such impediments – though friction of a different sort you will encounter here, between the two sides), and all the while you’re desperately clinging onto the hope that perhaps Popov will spare us from the inevitable. Alas, Popov does not. (Or perhaps thankfully, because it tickles me pink to see that some picture books don’t shy away from a dash of reality, which can occasionally be dismal.) The colour palette reinforces the somber story as it progresses, the landscape becoming ever more torn. The suit that the frog is wearing also takes on a whole other possibility when we consider that this skin-like suit might have been rendered from… but I’ve said enough already. Beautifully illustrated and told, Why? should become a childhood staple.

And if you’ve already read Why?, then I’ve got something else to recommend you under the cut.

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