Wordless Adventures for the Imaginative and Minuscule

Do you like my use of the word minuscule?  I recently got my paws on a Thesaurus,

which originally I thought was a type of dinosaur.  It's not!  It's full of pages and pages of words, and if you are a dog with a blog, you need all the help you can get thinking of new ways to say things.  After all, my world is very limited.

My minuscule person, the-one-who-plays-with-my-ears, liked these three books.  She especially liked them because she is learning to read and that makes her tired and cranky.  These have no words, so you can "read" them using the picture-walk method alone.  I am going to share my take on these three new books.

Link to book in SAILS Network

"Hank Finds an Egg" by Rebecca Dudley is a visual delight. She is an artist of many skills, and this is her first picture book.  The setting is Storywood Forest, the main character a little soft creature named Hank.  Even using my sniffing skills I could not tell what kind of animal he was, he just smelled like new book pages.  He finds an egg that belongs in a nest way up in a tree.  He tries, but can't return it to the nest, so cares for it during the night.  My favorite image is of his cozy campsite.  Will this book have a happy ending?  You bet!  Take it home and enter this magical world, seemingly free of cats but full of amazing detail and sweet kindness.  The author has a blog, www.storywoods.blogspot.com.

Link to book in SAILS Network

Link to book in SAILS Network

"Journey" by Aaron Becker is like "Harold and the Purple Crayon", with extra gravy on top.  Red is the special color, setting a young girl free from her drab apartment in the city where everyone else is too busy to play with her.  A red crayon makes a red door that opens on an incredible squirrel's paradise with lanterns.  I didn't see any squirrels, so they must have known I was coming and hidden in the huge trees.  From here the adventure gets more and more outrageous and exciting, and there is danger, too.  But a friend appears to save the day, and real life becomes full of promise.

Wow, I am really using this Thesaurus a lot for this entry.  I bet you think I'm a pretty intelligent dog, despite my inability to learn even the most basic commands, like "sit".

The last book is called "Inside Outside" by Lizi Boyd.  The only characters are a young child and a black dog.  Mom or Dad must be nearby, but they are never in the way.  Using the Thesaurus, I know to say "the color palette is very limited, giving a cohesion to the action as we make our way through the seasons."  There are cutouts for the windows so you can see the seasons change outside, and watch as the playroom changes also.  If you are a tired parent who allows too much TV because you are overwhelmed, but you feel badly about it and want to make a change, take this book home!  Watch the little child use nothing but his imagination and what he finds around him to explore and create, see how the parents let him draw and build and paint.  They don't worry about the mess, or about him getting wet in the puddles, or about that cat sleeping in a bowl on the counter, or even the mice participating in the art!  Let go of your ideas of a perfect house, because the perfect house is your child's brain, allowed to grow unfettered!  And I think that dirt and dog hair are part of that perfect expansive environment!  So there.