Susan Varley, Author, Jeanne Willis, Author Trafalgar Square Publishing $9.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-86264-790-2
The new boy at school refuses to take off the long blue blazer that hides his extraterrestrial identity. Ages 3-6. (June)
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Jeanne Willis, Author . Holt $16.95 (272p) ISBN 978-0-8050-7079-8
Convincingly adopting the voice of an adolescent boy, Willis (The Boy Who Lost His Belly Button) turns to the postwar '40s of her native Britain for the setting of this wry and wrenching first novel. The story begins as nine-year-old Mick and...
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Jeanne Willis, Author Grupo Editorial Norma $8.95 (32p) ISBN 978-958-04-6031-2
PreS-Gr 2-Child-centered in its approach, this book evokes the wonderment of young readers. Its lesson, that youngsters resemble their parents in one way or another, is invaluable and universal. Subsequent pages address similar queries from a...
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Jeanne Willis, Author Dutton Books $11.95 (24p) ISBN 978-0-525-44381-0
There is mystery and suspense surrounding Wilson, the new boy who arrives in class dusted with snow and shakes hands with the teacher. He wears a long blue blazer, all the way to the floor, and contrives to keep it on all day, even through gym class.
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Jeanne Willis, Author . Delacorte $15.95 (218p) ISBN 978-0-385-73166-9
Readers may have difficulty getting a handle on the characters for much of this British novel by the author of The Truth or Something.
Protagonist Will, who moves out of his mother's home at age 19, appears weirdly naïve for his years ("
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Jeanne Willis, Author, Tony Ross, Illustrator Atheneum Books $16.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-689-86524-4
This book reads from top to bottom, rather than from left to right. Vertical spreads surrounded by a white border depict a love affair between a caterpillar (on a willow leaf on the upper page) and tadpole (in a pond on the lower half of the spread).
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Jeanne Willis, Author, Tony Ross, Illustrator Dutton Books $12.95 (32p) ISBN 978-0-525-44732-0
Fresh from his lectures on Earthlets and Earth Hounds, the zany Xargle takes an entertaining look at Earth Tigerlets, otherwise known as cats. This playful alien's view of the friendly felines' antics is full of hilarious misconceptions--Tigerlets...
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Jeanne Willis, Author, Tony Ross, Illustrator Kane/Miller Book Publishers $13.95 (28p) ISBN 978-0-916291-78-5
This off-beat British import relates how a slow-moving sloth was a year late for his birthday party and thus had outgrown his main present, the shoes of the title. But while the book lacks a satisfying storyline, Willis and Ross (who joined talents...
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Jeanne Willis, Author, Tony Ross, Illustrator Atheneum Books $15.95 (32p) ISBN 978-1-4169-1490-7
From longtime collaborators Willis and Ross (Tadpole's Promise; I Hate School) comes a story about a concerned mother mouse, a misunderstood gorilla and a slightly scary global chase. Searching for her ""very, very small"" baby who has gone missing,
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Jeanne Willis, illus. by Tony Ross. Andersen Press USA (Lerner, dist.), $16.95 (32p) ISBN 978-1-4677-0314-7
Unlike the signature, comedic style of cartooning Ross uses in the Horrid Henry and Little Princess books, his textural pastel illustrations in this story about a baby barn owl are delicate and quiet, an excellent match for Willis’s lyrical text....
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Jeanne Willis, Author, Tony Ross, Illustrator , illus. by Tony Ross. Andersen $16.95 (24p) ISBN 978-0-7613-5151-1
The dimwitted titular hero and heroine of this story eat too much and exercise too little; when their comfy home can no longer accommodate their ever-growing girth, they decide to visit a “cunning tiger” and “wild wolf” from...
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Jeanne Willis, illus. by Tony Ross. Andersen (IPG/Trafalgar Sq., dist.), $9.99 paper (32p) ISBN 978-1-84939453-6
In a story first published in the U.K. in 1998, frequent collaborators Willis and Ross send up bucolic children’s verse in the style of A.A. Milne or Graham Greene with a gracefully constructed poem about the possible sources of a terrible smell....
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Jeanne Willis, Author, Tony Ross, Illustrator , illus. by Tony Ross. Eerdmans $16 (0p) ISBN 978-0-8028-5331-8
In another winner from a standout British team (Willis and Ross were previously paired for Tadpole's Promise
), Colin's worrywart mother, seeing danger at every turn, insists he stay indoors. He can't run, lest he fall; he can't...
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Jeanne Willis, Author, Tony Ross, Illustrator , illus. by Tony Ross. Holt $16.95 (32p) ISBN 978-0-8050-7672-1
Attitude—be it the down-in-the-dumps or happy-go-lucky variety—can be contagious, as seen in this warmly humorous picture book (from the creative team behind I Want to Be a Cowgirl
) about a cow with a glass-half-empty view of life. The &
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Jeanne Willis, Author, Tony Ross, Illustrator , illus. by Tony Ross. Atheneum/Schwartz $15.95 (32p) ISBN 978-0-689-86523-7
Any child who strongly resists school will find an advocate in young Honor Brown. "My teacher is a warty toad!/ My classroom is a hole!" she wails in this aria of woe, from the team behind I Want to Be a Cowgirl
and the Professor Xargle...
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Jeanne Willis, Author, Tony Ross, Illustrator , illus. by Tony Ross. Putnam $16.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-399-24008-9
Learning to ride a two-wheeler is an indisputable milestone for kids, but Willis and Ross (previously teamed for What Did I Look Like When I Was a Baby?) mine it for even deeper emotional significance—with mixed results. Megan wants her...
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Jeanne Willis, Author, Tony Ross, Illustrator , illus. by Tony Ross. Holt $14.95 (32p) ISBN 978-0-8050-6997-6
In this pert, pint-size take on "Don't Fence Me In," a spunky narrator rejects being "a girly girl" and the cushy urban life in "our twenty-story flat" and tells her uptight, apparently single dad that she yearns for the...
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Jeanne Willis, Author, Tony Ross, Joint Author DK Publishing (Dorling Kindersley) $14.95 (26p) ISBN 978-0-7894-6164-3
When a tousled hair boy wakes up to discover that his belly button has gone missing, drastic measures are called for: he goes to the jungle to look for it. He questions one mammal after another--a radiantly orange lion, a dark, smoky elephant--only...
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Jeanne Willis, illus. by Jenni Desmond. Tiger Tales, $16.99 (32p) ISBN 978-1-58925-169-4
Part quirky creation myth, part friendship fable, Willis’s (Chicken Clicking) story features two creatures who think they are singular in the world—until they find each other. After the “first Slodge in the universe” emerges (Desmond envisions the...
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Jeanne Willis, illus. by Jarvis. Nosy Crow, $15.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-7636-8944-5
The Pilchard-Browns, a family of penguins, get quite lost on their way to a picnic. Drifting along on an iceberg, they reach the North Pole, where an “enormous something” wearing a bowler hat offers to lead them home. “I have often dreamed of being...
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Jeanne Willis, illus. by Adam Stower. Barron’s, $10.99 (24p) ISBN 978-0-7641-6491-0
The wheels on the bus typically go round and round “all day long,” but in this rowdy version of the children’s song they do so “at the zoo,” as animals board an old-fashioned blue bus for their morning commute. Willis doesn’t bother much with...
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Jeanne Willis, Author, Susan Varley, Illustrator , illus. by Susan Varley. Peachtree $15.95 (32p) ISBN 978-1-56145-270-5
Being raised by teddy bears proves a cozy proposition in Willis and Varley's (previously teamed for The Monster Bed) endearing tale of a foundling child. At first, Big, Middle and Little Teddy are clueless—"He's hungry. Let's...
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Jeanne Willis, Author, Tony Ross, Author Fondo de Cultura Economica, Mexico $8.99 (0p) ISBN 978-968-16-8534-8
PreSchool-2-Translation is an art, and this nifty rendition of Jeanne Willis's quintessentially British-toned fable is as fine an example of depicting the language and tone of the original as one could wish. When Mrs. Bat moves into the neighborhood,
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Jeanne Willis, Author, Susan Kochan, Editor, Tony Ross, Illustrator Putnam Publishing Group $15.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-399-23595-5
The collaborators of the Dr. Xargle series here take humorous aim at the title question, beginning with a boy and proceeding to a variety of animal characters. Ross's cartoonlike illustrations complement the puns and double entendres in the text,...
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Jeanne Willis, Author, Adrian Reynolds, Illustrator Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing $12.99 (32p) ISBN 978-1-4169-3516-2
Any kid who's visited a public place on a crowded day will embrace this paper-over-board book's driving joke. As a humongous, potentially bladder-busting-long line stretches out from the front door of the zoo's apparently single public bathroom, two
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Jeanne Willis, illus. by Adrian Reynolds, Andersen Press USA (Lerner, dist.), $16.95 (32p) ISBN 978-0-7613-6445-0
With the careful placement of a banana peel, a hyena with a serious case of schadenfreude sets off a chaotic series of misfortunes. Giraffe slips on the peel and skids "straight into a tree—KER-RANG!" which causes a coconut to fall on Hippo, making...
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Jeanne Willis, illus. by Adrian Reynolds. Andersen Press USA (Lerner, dist.), $16.95 (32p) ISBN 978-0-7613-8093-1
When a boy spots a living, breathing dinosaur on the beach one wintry morning—"and I'm sure that he saw me," he adds with alarm—frenzy overtakes his town, which resembles Lyme Regis on England's southwest coast. Gapers (bearing everything from...
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Jeanne Willis, illus. by Adrian Reynolds. Andersen Press USA (Lerner, dist.), $16.95 (32p) ISBN 978-1-4677-3424-0
Willis and Reynolds, the team behind I'm Sure I Saw a Dinosaur and other stories, imagine a (gentle) global cataclysm that jumbles the natural order: "Once when the world tipped upside down,/ The earth went blue and the sky went brown./ All the baby
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Jeanne Willis, Author, Ruth Brown, Illustrator Dutton Books $13.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-525-45242-3
Offering an exercise of the imagination rather than a full-fledged story, this picture book combines a vague narrative with delicate, deliberately ambiguous illustrations. The narrator describes a trek through the forest with his older sister, who...
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Jeanne Willis, Author, Gwen Millward, Illustrator , illus. by Gwen Millward. Random/Schwartz & Wade $16.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-375-86176-5
Bog Babies have round blue bellies and little wings “no bigger than daisy petals.” The narrator, seen as a girl in a red jumper and pigtails, recounts finding one with her sister on a surreptitious visit to Bluebell Wood, “long ago,
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Jeanne Willis, Author, Jan Fearnley, Illustrator , illus. by Jan Fearnley. Candlewick $15.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-7636-3470-4
Through a series of tests—deliberate and not—a chick becomes almost totally convinced that his mother's affections are unshakable. Then, provoked by her son's almost manic cheeping, his mother momentarily loses it, and Little...
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Jeanne Willis, Author, Jan Fearnley, Illustrator , illus. by Jan Fearnley. Candlewick $10.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-7636-2267-1
A mouse's ingenuity in the name of love is the inspiration for this sweet, if somewhat cloyingly resolved, paper-over-board novelty book. Tiny Too-Little's beloved is "way up there," writes Willis (the Dr. Xargle books), although who
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Jeanne Willis, Author, Penny Dann, Illustrator Candlewick Press (MA) $13.99 (18p) ISBN 978-0-7636-2481-1
Fun packaging and details bring new titles to life. Clues in the form of newspapers, letters and guidebooks literally unfold in Operation Itchy by Jeanne Willis, illus. by Penny Dann. ""The name's Barker-Secret Agent Barker,"" begins the canine hero
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Jeanne Willis, Author, Mark Birchall, Illustrator Carolrhoda Books $7.95 (28p) ISBN 978-1-57505-508-4
Be Gentle, Python! and No, Biting Puma! by Jeanne Willis, illus. by Mark Birchall, teach gentle lessons to the littlest learners. Part of the Be Nice at School series, both books present cute but impish creatures as they wreak havoc on their...
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Joanne Willis, Author, Jeanne Willis, Author, Tony Ross, Illustrator Puffin Books $4.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-14-055293-5
Professor Xargle, a green space-being, gives comedic (if sometimes misguided) insight into the functions of human babies; PW praised the ``clever and original'' writing. Ages 4-7. (Dec.)
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