Tag Eunyoung Seo

Board Books for Christmas

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Cat Family Christmas
Lucy Brownridge and Eunyoung Seo
Frances Lincoln Children’s Books

There’s an olde world feel to this Christmas count down. We follow the Cat Family through the busy days in the run-up to the festival, right through to Christmas Eve in this lift-the-flap book.

With twelve days to go to the big day, after many hours working in town, Mummy Cat joins her kittens just back from school and Daddy Cat already there to welcome them, and then it’s all systems go. There’s so much to do: the first being putting up the decorations – a task for the kittens; then comes the baking of Christmas cake and mince pies – hmmm you can almost smell that lovely spicy aroma. While their parents write cards, the kittens write to Santa and the following day, the family go to meet Granny and Grandpa at the station. Next the Cat Family go out into the village to do some cat-a-carolling, “We fish you a meow Christmas and a tabby new year”. 

With six days to go, there’s a bit of garden harvesting needed of veggies for the Christmas feast and finally with all the last minute jobs done, it’s time for a snuggly Christmas Eve with the family and a regaling of Grandpa’s special story.

There’s seasonal cheer aplenty here with not a hint of a cross word or a tear and the family seemingly cruise through all the preparations. Eunyoung Seo’s scenes are bursting with detail and each spread has a plethora of small flaps to peep behind (careful handling required), where further details are revealed. This large format board book will last more than one season in contrast to the traditional advent calendar; moreover it’s something to share with your little ones.

Santa’s Christmas Countdown
Kath Jewitt and Sebastien Braun
Townhouse Publishing

Poor Santa! Having lost his list of jobs to do, he’s worked himself into such a state, till, lightbulb moment: he’s been doing them for so many years that surely he can now recall every single task. It’s surely worth a try so off he goes. First he checks the sleigh is clean and shiny; then there are all the presents to wrap and his own snacks to put in his food box. Singing jolly songs helps him get into the spirit of the season and of course, the reindeer must be well fed and their coats brushed. Good old elves, they’re at the ready for this job and more.

Then Santa works on himself: that entails donning his lucky socks and pants, some tonsorial treatment and then it’s time to get into his red outfit (heated of course). That done, he feeds his moggy, makes a hot chocolate, hitches the reindeer, loads the sleigh and Ho! Ho! Ho! off he jolly well goes on his round.

A touchy-feely, fun book for tinies with a rhyming text and Sebastien Braun’s bright, busy illustrations. It’s great to see a black, bespectacled Santa and a diverse team of elves too.

The Shrew That Flew/ The Dragon & the Nibblesome Knight

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The Dragon and the Nibblesome Knight
Elli Woollard and Benji Davies
Macmillan Children’s Books
Told through faultless rhyme – no easy matter despite Elli making it appear so – (with plenty of repetition, and sprinklings of onomatopoeia (FLASHes SPLASHes, FLAPs and CLAPs etc.) and awesome visuals – but one expects no less from Benji Davies – this is a stupendous offering. But, it’s the interaction of text and illustrations that makes the whole thing such a bobby dazzler of a book.
The tale revolves around Dram (love that name), an infant dragon, ejected from the Dragons of Dread family nest to search for ‘dribblesome, nibblesome, knobble-kneed knights.’

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In other words what he has to do is stand on his own feet, or rather fly with his own wings, and get his teeth and claws into a nibblesome knight. However that’s not quite what happens due to a prevailing wind – a looping, curling gale no less – that whisks young Dram ‘away to the End of the World’ depositing him unceremoniously into a lake beside which sits a diminutive knight. Said knight, James, takes the “duckie” under his wing …

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tending to his wounds and generally ministering to his injuries and sore parts,

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not to mention supplying nourishment for both Dram’s body and mind …

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The infant dragon however hasn’t forgotten his nibblesome knight procurement mission, so what will transpire when finally the dreadful realization dawns – that his new best friend is in fact, nothing less than a knight?

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Yes, there are faint echoes of Donaldson’s Zog here, but that is not to detract from its brilliance: if you want to do your bit to make children into life-long book lovers, there’s no doubt this is a MUST have book.

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Another Red Reading Hub favourite creative partnership is responsible for :

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The Shrew that Flew
Julia Copus and Eunyoung Seo
Faber & Faber
This is the third wonderful ‘Harry & Lil Story’ and they just seem to get better and better. In this adventure, Candy Stripe Lil and Harry the Hog (along with the other creatures on Piggyback Hill) having received this invitation …

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are busy preparing for Badger’s do. It’s already 2pm; Harry has donned his spotty, dotty, pointy, flat titfa’ and Lil’s is still drying out on the washing line. Until that is, along comes a sudden gust of wind that whisks the object right up onto the roof.

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Disaster! There follows an amazing sequence of hat-retrieving attempts involving a brolly,

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a portable fan and all manner of other discarded ephemera retrieved from the shed.

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But can they manage to get the thing down and onto Lil’s head in time for the party? It’s certainly not a simple task, but however formidable it might be, Lil is the eternal optimist (Oh Lil we need you NOW!). “NEVER SAY NEVER” is her maxim and with a bit of timely assistance from another of the party goers …

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it looks as though, they might, just might, be successful …

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Glorious, totally uplifting, a wonderful celebration of friendship and perseverance; Harry & Lil are eternally endearing. Eunyoung Seo’s delectable scenes, coupled with Julia Copus’ tongue-tingling rhyming text – here’s a sample
‘Lil gripped very tight; the umbrella bent
   and trembled,
         then tugged,
               then – whoosh! – up she went!
And floated off – past the sycamore stump …’
are guaranteed to bring joy to listeners and readers aloud, at every turn of the page. Spectacular!

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The Hog, the Shrew and the Hullabaloo

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The Hog, the Shrew and the Hullabaloo
Julia Copus and Eunyoung Seo
Faber & Faber Children’s Books
Harry the Hog is fast asleep until he hears an alarming sound outside. So terrified is he that he – a champion sleeper – has to call best friend Lil. In the blink of an eye, there she is to keep him company and attempt to determine the cause of the mysterious noise.

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During the course of the night the friends hear all manner of weird, wild sounds but do they ever discover the perpetrator of that fearful, dream-shattering hullabaloo and, equally important, get some shut-eye?
As in the first Harry and Lil story, both plot and visuals are superbly rendered. Poet, Julia Copus’ lilting rhyme flows beautifully and her choice of language is sheer delight:  ‘In the glow of the moon,
                                                                 In its silvery sheen … ‘
And ‘… through the not-quite-light,
             Through the in-between of day and night.’
are just two of the memorable verbal images we are treated to.
Eunyoung Seo’s exquisite illustrations are also a treat. Slightly whimsical, soft focus and wondrously detailed, they complement the text splendidly.

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It’s such a fine balance between words and pictures; Copus and Seo manage it to perfection. Their partnership is as felicitous as that between Harry and Lil.
If you missed their first story, Hog in the Fog, get your hands on that one too: you won’t regret it.

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A Search in the Fog, A Race in the Forest, A Flight from Danger

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Hog in the Fog
Julia Copus and Eunyoung Seo
Faber & Faber pbk
Shrew, Lil has invited Harry the Hog for tea at three:
‘There were chocolate-chip beetles and slug-flavoured chips
and warm jellied maggots with fruit-flavoured dips;’
and all manner of other goodies already on the table.
Three o’clock comes, then a quarter past; Lil looks anxiously out at the gathering gloom. By four she can wait no longer so donning her raincoat she sets out,

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‘Pittery pattery, tippety tappety’ up the hill in search of Harry.
First she encounters a sheep, but the sheep’s not seen a hog, just a hedge so she thinks, ”where no hedge was before.”

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She offers to help Lil search though and off they go together. The deer they meet has seen, he thinks, only “The wings of a bat … pinkish and flat.” But he’ll help look for the missing hog; so too will the crow who has seen naught but a sleeping snake on a log.

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Into the woods go the four as the swirling fog gets ever thicker until, around the next corner …
What’s that THING. The bush? The bat? The snake?
By now, young listeners will be unable to resist shouting the identity of the large hairy, ‘bog-soaked, mud-smeared’ creature that, after a whole lot of pulling and pushing, eventually comes slippily, slurpily, gluggily, gurgly from the muck. And guess what; he’s absolutely starving.
Good job that at her house, as Lil says, “it stays TEA o’clock for a very long while.”  Tuck in everyone!
Delicious, delectable and such enormous fun to read aloud. The rhyming text just trips, like those loving prepared treats of Lils, right off the tongue.
Equally praiseworthy are the wonderfully expressive watercolour illustrations, which capture the drama and the gentle humour to perfection making every turn of the page a treat too. Particularly gorgeous and an unexpected delight are deer’s fantastical , butterfly-attracting, flower-wrapped antlers.
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Billed as ‘A Harry & Lil story’ I hope this indicates more to come from the charmingly unlikely wild boar/shrew duo.
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The Great Race
Nathan Kumar Scott and Jagdish Chitara
Tara Books
In the third of the series of folk tales featuring trickster, Kanchil we find the boastful mouse deer proclaiming himself to be ‘the fastest animal in the forest’ and challenging the other animals to THE GREAT RACE OF THE JUNGLE. Having called upon the help of scarlet macaw, Kakatua to spread the word thoughout the forest, Kanchil waits by the riverbank to see who takes up his challenge.

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Soon, every animal appears but none save one tiny voice speaks; the voice is that of Pelan the snail. Laughable, thinks Kanchil on discovering the only contestant is to be a tiny snail; his laughter is echoed by the other animals but none steps forth other than tiger Harimau with an offer to act as referee and Gajah the elephant, the finishing judge.
The race begins, off zooms Kanchil, only to reach the finish in – shock horror – second place.

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A second race is called by Kanchil, against the river flow this time, but again Pelan gets there first.
How did a slow snail beat a fast deer? Have you guessed? Suffice it to say that the over-confident Kanchil is outwitted by a guileful Gastropod (or two).

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This amusing story (a kind of Hare and the Tortoise tale) is Nathan Kumar Scott’s retelling of an Indonesian folk tale brilliantly brought to life by Gujarati, Waghari artist, Jagdish Chitara. Jagdish used the same ancient artistic techniques and traditional blood red, brilliant white and black colours to portray the animals in this secular book as are used for the special ritual cloths for the Mother Goddess, called Mata Ni Pachedi (the cloth of the mother) traditionally used as temple hangings.
Another stellar book from the Indian publishing house that specializes in books illustrated by highly talented Indian artists.
Look out soon for quality paperback editions of some of Tara’s backlist to be available shortly.
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Dylan’s Amazing Dinosaurs: The Tyrannosaurus Rex
E.T.Harper and Dan Taylor
Simon and Schuster pbk
In Dylan’s incredible tree house he keeps important things; things like Wings, his toy pterodactyl and Grandpa Fossil’s Dinosaur Journal. Opening the latter brings the former to life and he becomes the vehicle for Dylan’s journeys of discovery.
We join Dylan as he and Wings set off to discover the number of teeth the T.Rex had. Their search for the answer results in a face-to-face encounter with the enormous creature itself – WOW! Those gnashers.
Quick Dylan, find something for it to sink those teeth into and flee for your life …

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So does our young hero escape and does he discover the answer to his dinosaur dentition question?

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Take a look at that log…

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then turn to Dylan’s T.Rex fact file and find his latest numerical entry.
With its ever popular topic, some delicious alliterative sound bites, fascinating, embedded facts (the author is herself a palaeontology professor), boldly rendered action scenes and a removable pop out T.Rex, this, the first Dylan adventure, is bound to be popular with young children particularly budding palaeontologists.
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