Hello Baby! By Mem Fox and Steve Jenkins

 



Fox, Mem., & Jenkins, S. (2009) HELLO BABY! Beach Lane Books. ISBN 9781416985136

 

The human baby in the story meets different animal baby’s including a monkey, porcupine, eagle, gecko, lion, hippo, leopard, elephant, warthog, crocodile, zebra, and an owl.  To the human baby’s parent, he is the biggest treasure of all!  It celebrates the bond between parent and child.

  

This is a charming children’s picture book. A good tool to use when studying poetry in the younger grades. The artwork is stunning.  There are no culture markers in the book.  I did some research on Mem Fox and discovered she is from Australia.  All of her books are published their first.  She is considered one of Australia’s bestselling authors.   On her website, https://memfox.com/ Mem Fox shares the story of how she came up with the idea for HELLO BABY! “I’m often asked where my ideas come from, and I can usually explain. But with Hello Baby! I remember nothing other than where I was when the idea hit me. In 2004, about two weeks before Christmas, I was walking with my husband along the esplanade beside ‘our’ beach when something happened: was it something a child called out on the beach? Was it something I thought of saying to a child as we were passing? Was it something I said to Malcolm? I can’t remember. Darn!  I recall being so excited that I left Malcolm to finish the walk on his own and hurried back to the house to write down the idea before it disappeared.”

 

Charlotte Zolotow Award-Commended 2010

CCBC Choices 2010

Publishers Weekly: “Fox's newest has all the marks of a lap-sit classic. In mellifluous motherese, the narrator poses a series of playful questions to a baby: “Are you a monkey with clever toes?/ Perhaps you're a porcupine, twitching its nose.” After 11 more such guesses (featuring such animal faves as the gecko, the hippo and the warthog), the narrator finally gets it right: “Wait, let me guess—Are you my treasure? The answer is... Yes!” While Fox is cooing as only she can, Jenkins (What Do You Do with a Tail Like This? ) works his usual magic with cut paper. In many of his large-scale closeups—the images spill across and off the spreads—his subjects' big, expressive eyes seem locked in a gaze with the reader. Ingeniously stylized shapes (like the coils of gray paper that form an elephant's trunk) combine with sumptuous detailing that brings alive the parade of scales, fur and feathers.”

Kirkus Reviews: “A warm authorial voice asks baby, “Who are you?” and a parade of potential animals follows. Rhyming questions introduce furry and scaly candidates, creating an irresistible call-and-response, conversational reading experience. Young readers will surely answer each erroneous guess with an emphatic, enthusiastic “Noooo…!” Jenkins’s vibrant cut- and torn-paper close-ups of exotic animals appear on double-page spreads of ample white space, giving readers room to thoroughly consider both illustrations and text. Vivid swaths of color and texture capture elephant wrinkles, crinkly gecko skin and even warthog whiskers. A small, full-body silhouette of each animal appears as well, providing a glimpse of the creature in motion.”

 

 Video of Mem Fox reading HELLO BABY!

HELLO BABY! Read by Mem Fox

Other books by Mem Fox:

THE TINY STAR  ISBN 9780593304013

CAT DOG  ISBN 9781416986881

Other books by Steve Jenkins:

CREATURE FEATURES: TWENTY-FIVE ANIMALS EXPLAIN WHY THEY LOOK THE WAY THEY DO  ISBN 9780544233515

THE BEETLE BOOK  ISBN 9780547680842

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

HEART AND SOUL: THE STORY OF AMERICA AND AFRICAN AMERICANS by Kadir Nelson

Image
  Nelson, K. (2011). HEART AND SOUL: THE STORY OF AMERICA AND AFRICAN               AMERICANS. Balzer+Bray.   Nelson begins the story with an introduction that talks about the many triumphs and hardships African Americans have overcome in America. Nelson then writes individual mini-chapters about significant events such as slavery, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, emancipation,  Jim Crow Laws, the Civil Rights Movement, and the vote for women.  Each section discusses significant members of the African American community and their contributions.  The author writes from the perspective of an unnamed narrator and reviews significant events in African American history.  They include the story of Pap “the only Africa-born slave in my family.”  Obviously, Pap is a decedent of the narrator. The book says Pap was captured from his village in 1850 as a child. It tells of his time...
Read more

Firekeeper's Daughter by Angeline Boulley

Image
          Boulley, A. (2021). FIREKEEPER’S DAUGHTER.  Henry Holt and Company.   Daunis Fontaine is torn between two worlds and families: her white French/Italian mother’s side and her father’s Ojibwe Firekeeper’s side. Some backstory: Daunis has experienced major loss and grief. Her father died when she was seven years old, her Uncle David (mother’s brother) died just a few months before the story begins, and her grandmother (mother’s mother) had a stroke shortly after Uncle David’s death. Daunis defers her upcoming enrollment at the University of Michigan to stay with her mother, who has taken both losing her brother and her mother’s illness very hard. The beginning of the story has a dark tone. You get a sense that something bad is going on in this community—Daunis’s best friend Lily’s ex-boyfriend is struggling with drugs, there is political unrest as the tribal election is underway, and it isn’t completely clear yet what happened to Uncl...
Read more

DRAWING FROM MEMORY by Allen Say

Image
       Say, A. (2011). DRAWING FROM MEMORY. Scholastic Press.   Top of Form DRAWING FROM MEMORY is Allen Say's own story of his path to becoming the renowned artist he is today. As a boy, he was shunned by his father, who didn't understand his son's artistic abilities. He was sent off to school in Tokyo where he meets Noro Shinpei, Japan's leading cartoonist and the man he came to love as his "spiritual father."  Shinpei takes him under his wing and begins to nurture his talent and love for art. He works hard in rigorous drawing classes, studies, trains, and eventually finds himself in his art.   The book is Say’s memoir of him growing up in Japan. It includes many of his cartoon drawings, watercolor paintings, vintage photographs, and maps. It demonstrates the real-life relationship between a mentor and his student. The author’s note gives you a look at Say’s life when he is older. He talks about Shinpei and his going back to Japan as an adult, to see...
Read more