Black book of colors in Braille by Menena Cottin and illustrated by Rosana Faría and translated from Spanish by Elisa Amado
How do you describe the colors of the rainbow to someone who cannot see them? This inventive picture book relates the ways to experience colors—through smell, taste, touch, and hearing. The descriptive, sensory text, which incorporates white type and Braille, combined with an innovative design makes the experience how to look at the world in whole new way. I love how the illustrations are etched on the page forcing you to feel the book. It is truly innovative and original.
Little yellow leaf by Carin Berger
The story focuses on a single leaf that is just not ready to leave the branch of its great oak tree. While other leaves swirl down, this leaf keeps holding on as fall turns to winter. The amazing and inventive collage-based illustrations range from a closeup of the leaf that reveals words and letters on it to an image of the sun that seems to have been formed from a mosaic of bricks. It is not until the leaf spies a scarlet flash high up on an icy branch that it can contemplate the next step. Over the final pages the two leaves soar through the sky, together. The illustrations show landscape by incorporating lined paper, graph paper, newspaper articles, and water bills. It is a truly lovely book about fall and independence. It makes me look at trash in a whole new way.
Wabi Sabi by Mark Reibstein; art by Ed Young
When visitors come to Kyoto, they ask the cat’s owner the meaning of her name; Wabi Sabi. When she hears that it’s hard to explain, Wabi Sabi sets off on a journey to find the answer. Each animal she visits gives a piece of the complicated puzzle. Still, the cat is confused. But the more she looks, feels, and sees, her new affinity for the simplicity of nature and the elegance of what is brings her to her own poetry—and understanding.
Ed Young is one of my favorite illustrators and I'm always interested in what he is doing next. This book was fun yet though provoking and I so enjoyed the journey.