Wellness-Geniar

Be a Tree! by Maria Gianferrari illustrated by Felicita Sala Review Copy from Abrams Kids I picture-walked Be a Tree! three times before I actually read the words. Felicita Sala's illustrations for Maria Gianferrari's poetic text are mesmerizingly immersive and richly colorful within a palette of earth tones. Throughout the text, Gianferrari, who shares her inspiration for this book in the author's note ( Peter Wohleben's The Hidden Life of Trees ), gently maintains the human connection to trees and the connections (and communications) trees share with each other.  Be a Tree!  begins exuberantly, inviting the reader to "Be a tree! Stand tall. Stretch your branches to the sun. Let your roots curl, coil in the soil to ground you." From your spine/trunk to your skin/bark and your heart/pith, the words carry you inward and then zoom outward and up to the canopy and ultimately, the forest. "You are one of many trees," and our roots "twine with fung

Under Earth , Under Water by Aleksandra Mizielińska and Daniel  Mizieliński is their fourth book I have reviewed here and their fourth book with the marvelous Big Picture Press , a publisher of oversized, highly illustrated, gorgeous books who believe that books should be "visually intelligent, surprising, and accessible to readers of all ages, abilities and nationalities." BPP definitely achieves this with every book they publish and, if you are a book lover, you will want to seek out all their titles. Under Earth , Under Water will appeal to anyone who likes to look inside things and understand how things work. With Under Earth, Under Water , the Mizielińskis, who have an illustration style that is filled with tiny details and a unique palette, take readers on a detailed journey, from the top of the page to the bottom, over and under land and then sea. The endpapers serve as the introduction and table of contents, with images scattered across the spread, page nu

  The New Friend  by Charlotte Zolotow illustrated by Benjamin Chaud Review Copy from Abrams Kid s Charlotte Zolotow (1915 - 2013) was a writer, poet, editor and publisher. She had her own imprint at HarperCollins and the Cooperative Children's Book Center  created an award in her name in 1998 that honors the author of the best picture book published each year. As her obituary in The New York Times notes, Zolotow stood out for plumbing "children's interior lives, often ranging over loneliness, loss, longing and other painful topics that earlier generations of children's books had either sugar coated or ignored outright." While children's books have evolved to address myriad experiences and emotions from increasingly diverse perspectives over the last fifty years, Zolotow's work remains relevant, although diversity in the illustrations would be welcome. Originally published in 1968, I began reading, despite having read (and owning) other books by Zolotow