Book Recommendations: All In a Day; City I Love

Here’s my second book-recommendation post in honor of the Share a Story – Shape a Future Blog Tour for Literacy. (The first is here; if you count my mention of the Harvey Milk book yesterday, then this is really the third book post this week.)

I’m going to highlight two new picture books today, both from Abrams Books for Young Readers. Each takes a different environment as the subject for its poetry.

The first, All In a Day, by Newbery Award winner Cynthia Rylant, is a single story-poem about the promise of a day and our need to make the most of it. The bold cut-paper illustrations by Nikki McClure show a young boy exploring the natural wonders of his backyard and the woods nearby. It’s a peaceful, hopeful book, and a gentle read for bedtime and other quiet moments.

The illustrations show the boy with both an adult woman and an adult man, but never both at the same time, so same-sex or single parents could easily adapt the adult figures to those in their own families.

City I Love, by Lee Bennett Hopkins, is a vibrant collection of 18 different poems about cities around the world. Each focuses on a small detail of urban life—a merry-go-round, a fire hydrant, a kite, a mother pigeon, the weather.

Illustrator Marcellus Hall has drawn for the New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal, among other places, but seems as much at home depicting urban life for children as for adults. While the drawings show people going about their lives in their various cities, an anthropomorphic dog with a backpack shows up unobtrusively in each picture. It is a hidden treasure for children to spot, representative of a traveler and outsider who is nevertheless curious about his or her new surroundings.

All in a Day is out now; City I Love is technically launching in April, for National Poetry Month, but it looks like it’s available now on Amazon.

Thanks to Green Dads for alerting me to the Share a Story event.