Animal Attributes

Children’s Books

Animal Attributes

‘If You Were a Panda Bear,’ by Florence Minor, and More

From "If You Were a Panda Bear"

By SARAH HARRISON SMITH

Published: June 26, 2013

Animals are useful in children’s books: they’re beautiful, colorful and both similar to and different enough from humans for children to view them with detached amusement — or sympathy. In three new books this month, writers structure their stories around the unusual characteristics of wombats, bears and sloths.

ONE VERY TIRED WOMBAT

Written and illustrated by Renée Treml

32 pp. Random House Australia. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 3 to 5)

IF YOU WERE A PANDA BEAR

By Florence Minor

Illustrated by Wendell Minor

32 pp. Katherine Tegen Books/HarperCollins Publishers. $17.99. (Picture book; ages 4 to 8)

LOST SLOTH

Written and illustrated by J. Otto Seibold

32 pp. McSweeney’s McMullens. $16.95. (Picture book; ages 6 to 8)

Related

• Times Topic: Children's Books Reviews

Enlarge This Image

From "One Very Tired Wombat"

Enlarge This Image

From "Lost Sloth"

Like little humans, Australian wombats need a lot of sleep. And as some babies seem to do, they sleep mostly during the day. In “One Very Tired Wombat,” Renée Treml, a Melbourne-based author and illustrator, tells the story of a very cute, very dozy wombat whose attempts to nap are continually interrupted by nine sets of birds, from kookaburras to fairy wrens, who want to use his sweetly rounded back as a perch, or in the case of a playful group of little blue penguins (did you know Australia had them?), as a slide.

In rhyming verse, Treml counts the wombat’s visitors as they coo, giggle, warble, chatter, squawk and sing. “Seven garish galahs — as noisy as a train! / Poor tired wombat, these birds are such a pain.” Finally the birds go a feather too far and the wombat sneezes, chasing them away, at least for the moment.

This is Treml’s first picture book. Her artwork is distinctive; she uses a penknife to scratch black ink off a clay-painted board or paper, then applies paint to the scratched surface. Her method renders feathers, and particularly fur, dense with detail and seemingly three-dimensional. Though the animals are shown in black and white, each page has a deep pastel background to add interest. The effect, combined with her funny narrative, is charming and instructive.

“If You Were a Panda Bear,” by the author Florence Minor and her husband, the illustrator Wendell Minor, isn’t all about pandas. In brilliant colored gouache, with soft, fuzzy, furry detail, the Minors, who live and work in rural Connecticut, depict 10 kinds of bears enjoying their natural environments. Seen with their cubs, hunting, napping or moongazing, these bears range from the familiar polar bears and black bears to sun bears, sloth bears and moon bears.

A simple narrative, again in rhyme, gives a few facts about each bear (“If you were a moon bear, / You’d stay out late at night, /And the mark on your chest / Would look just like a light”), supplemented by a list of more earnest “Bear Fun Facts” at the end of the story. All the bears, even the impressively tall grizzly, look friendly, and the 10th bear — shown in his home environment, among other toys in a cozy chair, is, like this beautiful book, clearly a good bedtime companion.

J. Otto Seibold uses the slow and sleepy ways of sloths to add fun to “Lost Sloth,” a wacky tale for young readers published by McMullens, the children’s book imprint from McSweeney’s. Seibold’s book has an animated, trendy feeling to it. His protagonist is first seen asleep in a lavender armchair, with a fuchsia guitar in his lap. Perhaps he is tired after a late-night set? The room’s striped wallpaper could have been designed by Paul Smith, and the carpet pattern is woven with the words “hotel carpet.”

When Sloth is woken by a call announcing that he’s got only a few hours to claim a shopping spree (“What’s a spree?” thinks the sloth) he manages to get an uncharacteristically speedy start by using a clothesline as a zip line. How the suburban backyard we see him flying through relates to that hotel carpet remains a mystery, but the reader begins to root for Sloth: “Hurry Sloth!” the text prompts, as he misses the bus, swings slowly through the trees and hitches a ride on an ice cream cart. Just as he seems to be hopelessly lost, “something extraordinary,” and again, inexplicable, happens, and he hang-glides safely off a bluff to the store where his spree awaits.

As with his earlier books, like “Olive, the Other Reindeer,” Seibold, who is from Oakland, Calif., has drawn the artwork in “Lost Sloth” with a stylus on a digital tablet, using Adobe Illustrator. His palette is remarkable: rich olives, storm-cloud blues, and slightly murky but appealing shades of raspberry and grape. The excitement of the colorful pages and the disjointed action of the narrative may not appeal to tradition-minded families, but for others, this book is certain to feel inventive and contemporary, an example, as in the animal kingdom, of the beauty that can be seen in adaptation to a changing environment.