At this time of year, we strive to come up with just the right gift for each young person on our list, hoping these books will go on to be perennial favorites. We hope the 20 titles reviewed below will help.
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Speaking of favorites, we had a chance to sit down with Kelly Bingham and Paul O. Zelinsky, the imaginative minds behind Z Is for Moose and this year's Circle Square Moose.
Bingham got the idea for Z Is for Moose while working as a storyboard artist and director for Walt Disney Feature Animation. She sat in on a casting audition one day, and heard the directors say "great job" to the actor, then "We don't want that guy" to each other. That experience, combined with a writing teacher who discussed metafiction, and a three-year-old son learning his ABCs, gave Bingham the inspiration for a story starring an animal who mistakenly believes he got the part and is waiting his turn, impatiently, to perform onstage.
"At first Mouse was going to get the part," Bingham admits, "but Moose was funnier." As the illustrator, Zelinsky said, "I had to approach it like a math problem: 32 pages and 26 letters." (Luckily, his father is a math professor.) He had to think: "If F is on the left, and G is on the right, what does that do to Y and Z?" For their first book together, they worked separately, relying on their editor, Virginia Duncan, to meld their contributions into a unified whole.
They used a more collaborative process for Circle Square Moose. Bingham said she was having trouble "finding my footing." Then Zelinsky took Bingham's text, mapped it out as a book dummy, and sent it to Duncan. Once Bingham saw the dummy, she knew where she needed to do the work.
The results? We say, "Encore!" 1 2 3 Moose?--Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness