Publishers Weekly - August 28, 2017

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The power of a great haircut is on full display in Barnes and James’s vibrant picture book (reviewed on this page).

Picture Books
One Little Goat

Ursula Dubosarsky, illus. by Andrew Joyner.

Little Hare (IPG/Trafalgar Sq., dist.), $17.99

The duo behind The Terrible Plop returns with a spiky riff on the cumulative song “Had Gadya” (a Passover Seder staple) that softens its sharp edges—somewhat.

Joyner’s loopy, brightly colored cartoons set the action in a contemporary-looking village, where a girl introduces the “little baby goat/ My daddy bought.” As in the original song (which dates to the 16th century), the goat is promptly eaten—in this case by a tabby cat wearing a mauve suit.

Joyner shows the girl looking at the cat with alarm (the rope leash she’s holding now ends in its mouth). The cat is then bit by a dog that gets whacked by a “great big stick” come to life, which is burned by a ball of flame that runs around on stick legs. The destruction continues (an ox in a tracksuit is chased by a cleaver-wielding mouse butcher) until everyone is scared off by a foreboding stranger. In the original, this character is the angel of death. Here, it’s neighborhood kids in disguise—joined by the somehow resurrected goat—who defuse the preceding comic violence with a good dose of mischief. Up to age 4. (Oct.)

; Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut

Derrick Barnes, illus. by Gordon C. James.

Bolden/Millner (PGW, dist.), $17.95 (32p)

ISBN 978-1-57284-224-3

How good can a haircut make a person
feel? “Magnificent. Flawless. Like royalty.”
In a powerfully moving tribute to barber-
shop culture, Barnes (We Could Be Brothers)
addresses readers directly—and it’s safe to
say his audience is primarily boys of
color—using hyperbole to boost their con-
fidence and help them recognize their own
value. “You came in as a lump of clay,” he
writes, “a blank canvas, a slab of marble./
But when my man is done with you,/
they’ll want to post you up in a museum.”
Created with thick, forceful daubs of
paint, James’s luminous portraits reinforce
the idea that, when a person looks this
good, not even the sky is the limit. Of a
man admiring the curving designs newly
shaved into his head, the narrator remarks,
“Maybe there’s a river named after him on
Mars. He looks that important.” Pride,
confidence, and joy radiate from the pages,
both in the black and brown faces of men,
women, boys, and girls featured in
Barnes’s majestic paintings, and in writing
that celebrates human worth with every
syllable. Barbers included: “Tip that man!
Tip that man!” Ages 3–8. (Oct.)

Three Balls of Wool

Henriqueta Cristina, trans. from the Portuguese by Lyn Miller-Lachmann, illus. by Yara Kono. Enchanted Lion (Consortium, dist.),

$16.95 (32p) ISBN 978-1-59270-220-6

Produced in association with Amnesty International, this allegorical story follows a family that flees a “warm, sunny country” beset by vaguely described political troubles for a “clean and tidy” nation where “all the children go to school.” When buying sweaters for her children, the narrator’s mother realizes that only three colors are available: gray, green, and orange. “They look like an army marching in their uniforms,” she whispers to her husband. She then unravels the sweaters and combines the yarn to knit new ones in bold checks, zigzags, and stripes—surprising the town’s residents and starting a fashion trend.

Except for a handful of pink-skinned chil-
dren, Kono sticks to a limited palette of
gray, green, orange, and black in her illus-
trations—blocky, screenprintlike images
dotted with Xs, Os, and other characters
that evoke knitting symbols. It’s a quiet
and sensitively observed look at a family’s
efforts to stay safe in uncertain times. An
afterword reveals the story’s inspiration in
a family that fled Portugal’s dictatorship
in the 1960s and settled in Prague; the
United Nations’ Universal Declaration of
Human Rights appears in full in the final
pages. Ages 3–9. (Oct.)

The Bad Mood and the Stick Lemony Snicket, illus. by Matthew Forsythe. Little, Brown, $17.99 (48p) ISBN 978-0-316- 39278-5

Curly wears overalls and two poofy pigtails. Her expression is stormy. A multicolored bad mood hovers above her like a cloud. Then she pokes her brother with a stick and cheers right up. Curly’s mother has the bad mood now; then it moves to a man named Lou, and from there “all over the world. You yourself had it several times.” All kinds of feelings prove contagious in Snicket’s story; the lowly stick spreads cheer in Curly’s town the way the bad mood spreads gloom. The story traces how chance knits together the lives of Curly, her family, Lou, Lou’s dry cleaner, and the ice cream man. Snicket doesn’t paper over the way the discomfort of others can turn a bad mood around; at the same time, he celebrates generosity, community, and the workings of fate (“You never know what is going to happen”). Forsythe’s sherbet-hued images combine big cartoon gestures with rich color. Snicket’s quirky narrative voice and observations of events both great and lowly make this a fine readaloud—and a sure cure for a bad mood. Ages 4–8. Author’s agent: Charlotte Sheedy, Charlotte Sheedy Literary. Illustrator’s agent: Judith Hansen, Hansen Literary. (Oct.)

A Night Out with Mama

Quvenzhané Wallis, illus. by Vanessa Brantley-Newton. Simon & Schuster, $17.99 (40p) ISBN 978-1-4814-5880-1

What’s it like to walk the red carpet when you’re a kid? Wallis knows: at age nine, her feature-film debut in Beasts of the Southern Wild earned her a Best Actress nomination, making her the youngest nominee ever. In Wallis’s first children’s book (publishing simultaneously with the launch of a chapter book series), the reason for the lightly fictionalized narrator’s