Postcards

Mario Ramos Le Code de la Route Paris, France: L'école des loisirs, 2010 33 pages, ISBN: 9782211200042 (wordless picture book, 4-10)

Well-known Belgian author and illustrator Mario Ramos entertains both children and adults with Le Code de la Route. This wordless picture book is a creative and humorous rendition of "Little Red Riding Hood." A modern-day Red Riding Hood--with red coat, matching hair band, and boots-sets off on her red scooter to granny's house. As she follows the path through the woods, she comes across some unusual traffic signs. The red triangles with black outlines take up an entire page and have images such as three pigs or a wolf. One can pause to imagine what the signs warn of. With the turn of the page, however, the reader is surprised with delightfully colorful and fast-paced scenes. The Three Pigs zoom by on skateboards or the Big Bad Wolf clumsily passes by on roller skates. Red Riding Hood stays focused, diligently yielding at each road sign, to reach grandmother's home safe and sound. Readers will have great fun commenting on familiar characters in a new setting as well as creating dialogue of their own.

Michelle Gonzalez

Ningeokuluk Teevee Alego Illustrated by the author Toronto: Groundwood Books, 2009 Unpaged ISBN: 9780888999436 (picture book, 4-8)

Ningeokuluk Teevee, one of the most well-known of the Kinngait, Nunavut (Cape Dorset) artists working in the tradition of Inuit art, has written and illustrated a simple, yet elegant book. This story of a young Inuit child's daily life with her Grandmother is autobiographical and tells of the clam digging adventure offered by a low tide. The graphite and colored pencil illustrations beautifully capture the atmosphere of the beach and the marine life introduced. The bilingual text, in Inukititui and English, is a fine introduction to a script that is not Roman. The book includes an illustrated glossary of sea creatures, as well as a pictorial map of Baffin Island. This unique title may be used to expand children's thinking about how people live and work both in a family and in the world.

Jeffrey Brewster

Kou Yaginuma Futatsu no Supika [Twin Spica] Vol. 1 Translator: Maya Rosewood First published in Tokyo, Japan: Media Factory, Inc., 2002 English translation published in New York, NY: Vertical, Inc., 2010 188pp. ISBN: 978-1-934287-84-2 (Manga, Science Fiction, 13+)

With recent media attention on Naoko Yamazaki, Japan's first female astronaut to join the crew of the international space station, this classic manga is experiencing are surgence in popularity. Now that it is published for the first time in English, Western readers may join 14-year-old Asumi Kamogawa as she realizes her life's ambition to train as an astronaut at the Tokyo Space School. Set in the near future after a tragic rocket accident claims her mother's life, the story follows Asumi as she greets each new challenge with warmth and enthusiasm. Yaginuma's illustrations are a charming complement to his heartfelt and deftly-told story. By turns optimistic and poignant, Twin Spica is a delightful tale for anyone who has ever dreamed of going into space.

Tanja Nathanael

Janja Vidmar Pink Radovljica, Slovenia: Didakta, 2008. 139 pp. ISBN: 978-961-261-069-2 (novel, 14 +)

Pink is the most autobiographical, and therefore unique, novel to date in the literary work of Janja Vidmar, one of the most popular Slovene authors. Despite the third-person narrator, we are drawn to this conclusion by the name of the main character, the precision of the places described in the book, and the recognizable, almost cult-like, details from 1970s Maribor. This unrestrained realism is also experienced in the level of language which the author handles skilfully and boldly. The manifold linguistic registers-from formal literary language to dialect and slang in humorous and always convincing dialogue-give the novel its powerful tone and also serve to emphasize the authenticity of the period, an element that the author...