Picture Book Club

Alan Zweibel is a comedic genius. A former writer for the original Saturday Night Live, he has won tons of Emmy awards for writing on various TV shows and comedy specials. He also happens to be a fantastic children’s book writer.

In his book Our Tree Named Steve, Zweibel writes a letter, as a father, to his three children. (The names of the children are actually the names of Zweibel’s children, making me wonder if this could be an autobiographical story.) He reminisces about the family tree—a tree they spared from being cut down when they built their house, which got its name from the youngest child dubbing it “Steve” when she couldn’t pronounce “tree.”

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Pat Hutchins’s 1971 picture book Titch is a classic example of how being little can be a good thing. Titch, the title character, is a little boy who isn’t very happy being little. Though it’s never explained in the text, Titch’s unhappy expressions convey his displeasure being smaller than his sister Mary and his brother Pete very well.

Mary and Pete, both older than little Titch, the title character, are quite smug with being bigger— and shows it in their pictures. All of Titch’s stuff is smaller than Mary and Pete’s as well—his bike, his pinwheel (his brother and sister have tall kites instead), and his musical instrument. In every picture, poor Titch is either sad or confused as he watches his big brother and big sister outdo him in everything they do together.

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Molly Bang’s Ten, Nine, Eight is a beautifully written children’s book that counts down to a child’s bedtime. Each illustration is lovingly detailed with a mixture of childlike wonder and soft, comforting colors. Each picture builds upon the previous one’s scene, displaying tiny glimpses of a single child’s room. This almost makes the book appear to provide a peek into the way a child views the world—or at least his or her own bedroom—and, indeed, most of the illustrations are from the child’s point of view in the story, as you can see from the first picture of the child’s toes sticking out in front of her.

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In the Midwest where I live, it’s a perfect time of year to enjoy Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day. Published in 1962, it’s the story of an adorable little boy named Peter who, donned in a gnome-like red snowsuit, embarks on a simple yet lovely adventure into the snow on the first snowy day of the year.

Peter engages in the very same things most preschoolers would find interesting to do in the snow. He admires the highly piled snow, crunches his feet in it satisfyingly, experiments with different ways to walk in the snowy powder, uses a stick to explore the snow, makes a snowman and a snow angel, and other activities. Peter even contemplates joining the “big boys” for a snowball fight but knows that he’s just not old enough—“not yet.”

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