At the risk of stealing a bit from Fuse Eight, here’s two oddly similar books*, THE CAT WAY (October 8, 2024) and I KNOW HOW TO DRAW AN OWL (October 29, 2024). 2025 may be the year of the rhinoceros, but 2024 was apparently the year of the red flannel and black jeans clad nocturnal naturalist.

*superficially, anyway. Each story is beautiful and beautifully unique.

I picked up three outstandingly beautiful picture books at the Oakland Public Library’s Friends of the Library booksale for one dollar each, a terrific deal. Generally, I spend about five bucks on the old titles I pick up at my local used bookstore and somewhere between five and ten for the titles I buy off ThriftBooks on ebay but from time to time I’ll drop a bit more moolah on something special. Something like this:

Thurber is great but I really bought it for Simont, who’s art I absolutely love. Also, for the paper texture. Look.

The Wonderful O is the fifth of Thurber’s fairy tales. It’s been a while since I’ve read Many Moons (1943) and The Thirteen Clocks (1950) but I think this book has a thinner plot. It’s centered around a mysterious figure who bans all Os from the island nation of Ooroo. The citizens of R (as Ooroo comes to be known), need to fight back but the secret of their salvation is hidden in a missing word.

The islanders remember HOPE, they reclaim LOVE, they have VALOR. What do you suppose the fourth word is? The book is sixty-eight years old so I’m not worried about spoilers. Here’s the word:

If you asked me what my favorite animal was when I was a little kid, I would have said bear. No hesitation. I loved bears and even, up until I was three or four years old, believed I was one, calling myself “Baby Bear”. When I was a bit older, around ten years old, tigers were it. I thought they were beautiful and I loved the mythology of them being the only cat that liked water. There may have also been some decolonization of my imagination at play (bears were my favorite when I was living in California, tigers became my favorite when I moved to Jakarta).

At twelve years old, my family moved to Canada but beavers never became my favorite animal. Years later, however, moose would.

So, what’s my favorite animal now? It’s actually a little complicated. I answered this question for my students (when I was making videos for them during Covid) thus:

So, yeah, rhinos are up there. The fascination is recent, relatively speaking. I got most interested in them when I saw a The Dodo video about a baby rhino who befriended a kitten. That video made me realize that rhinos are much more like cows (in attitude) than they are the short-tempered, tank-bodied behemoths cartoons usually portray them as. They are interesting to look at and fun to draw.

You won’t be surprised, then, that I have a couple or rhino manuscripts. One of them is coming out in June of this year. How special! How specific! How singular! Right?

WRONG.

It turns out there are a LOT of rhino books coming out in 2025. Take a gander. We have Big Bike, Little Bike by Kellie DuBay Gillis and Jacob Souva.

Little Rhino Lost by Candy Gourlay and Jamie Bauza.

Never Take Your Rhino on a Plane by K.E. Lewis and Isabel Roxas

And, of course, Big Rhinoceros, Little Rhinoceros by me

Everything’s coming up rhinos! And I’m not sour that I’m sharing shelf space with these other books. The more rhinos, the better (a saying I would apply to Earth as well). I do find it surprising that rhinos are, apparently, 2025’s animal of choice. I remember hedgehogs being big, then octopuses, then sloths, then llamas. I don’t think I ever expected rhinos to make it there but I am thrilled that they have. It looks like my collection of books with “rhino” in their title is going to almost double in size!

I just had a lot of fun reading OH, OLIVE! by Lian Cho and I want to share that with you.

So, I pre-ordered this book a few months ago. I saw the cover reveal and knew I wanted it. How could I not? Olive is a kid after my own heart. Our studio floors look the same.

I will often preorder books and then forget to read them. It’s ridiculous, I know, but usually by the time the book arrives, some new shiny object has caught my eye. Or maybe, in the time it took for the book to come out, the whole world has gone to hell. But today I was reminded that this book was waiting for me and I’m so happy I was.

Not least of all because there was a print inside the package. Whaaaat?

OH, OLIVE! is a joy. I love it. The book is very smartly put together but for me 99% of the charm comes from the main character’s face.

There’s something in the art that reminds me very distinctly of Satoshi Kitamura’s work.

Some of that is in the character’s proportions, but also in how the illustrations are staged. Like Kitamura, Cho’s use of panels reads so clearly and cleanly. I envy this.

The backgrounds in those two panels reminded me a lot of another favorite creator, Taro Gomi. I couldn’t find my copy of Gomi’s COCO CAN’T WAIT, which I think has some kind of similar horizon/skyline, but here’s the cover of MY FRIENDS that shows a little of what I’m talking about.

And there’s such a beautiful simplicity in the character’s design that Cho nails. But besides that simplicity, Olive’s design is just plain funny. Maybe that’s why Olive also reminded me of these kids that British editorial cartoonist Giles would draw.

I was obsessed with “Little Giles” and now I’m obsessed with Olive.

Oh, hey, check out the copyright page. I was oh-so-happy to see the media listed here… I think for the story to work, the illustrations had to be this analog.

It’s obvious, I think, that I’m a fan of the art but I also love the story. As the story reaches its climax and I reached this point in the illustrations, I actually said “Ohhhh no…” (or maybe it was “Ohhhh damn…”).

But I won’t spoil that. You can see for yourself. Go grab OH, OLIVE! It’s worth it, with or without the art print. I wrote this post after a single reading, I’m sure there’s way more to appreciate. In fact, if you have a copy of OLIVIA by Ian Falconer (which I don’t, surprisingly), I bet that’d make for a fun side-by-side review.

In closing, I LOVE THIS FACE!!!

I’ve been looking forward to reading THESE OLIVE TREES by Aya Ghanameh at least since this Twitter thread about the dearth of Palestinian books in children’s publishing (the post points to this article by Nora Lester Murad on the School Library Journal website). I’ve got the book in hand now and there’s a lot I like about it, particularly how the illustrations capture the texture of risograph printing, which, if you read my post on illustration styles through the decades, you know is one of my favorites.

I’m impressed, also, that the book ends on something of a hopeful note. You have the feeling that these olive trees, uprooted, bulldozed, displaced and otherwise destroyed, remain resilient and will survive as seeds. Or maybe that’s just me looking for hope.

My mind keeps going back to this short film, YEARBOOK by Bernardo Britto.

In this short, the main character is tasked with recording the entirety of human history on a single hard drive before its extinction. When the hard drive begins to run out of memory, he must decide which people and events get cut. This is a pessimistic take, and to be honest, an uncomfortable one as I offer it from the safety of my North American privilege, but I keep wondering when an author is faced with the genocide of their people, what makes it into the scant 32 pages and some hundred words that make up a picture book?

Author Astrid Kamalyan, Artsakh Armenian, tells the story of her people’s rug washing tradition in BÁBO. It’s a lovely book and I don’t think there’s a wasted line but there’s one right in the middle of the book that captures my imagination. “The hot air in the garden smells like simmering rose jam.” It feels like there’s something important in that image.

I’m not certain what I’m writing about here. I don’t know if I can read either of these books outside the context of genocide, and I don’t know if I even should try to. At the same time, I wish I could celebrate Palestinian and Armenian storytelling for their own sakes. I want to know if there are unicorns in Palestine and dragons in Armenia. I want to know if the poetry and humor of the authors’ writing matches the landscapes of their countries. (If that sounds selfish and indulgent, do know that what I’m really asking for is a world where this kind of selfish indulgence is allowed.)

Ultimately, if this is just about me and why I’m writing this barely-about-picture-books post, I feel a need to bear witness. YEARBOOK ends with the idea that on a cosmic scale all that really matters is the here and now. The here and now, presently, is terrible and I can hardly come to terms not only with the fact that I’m holding two books by two authors who are personally affected by current genocides but there are, in fact, other ongoing genocides happening in the world (Sudanese and Uyghur, to say nothing of indigenous tribes of the Amazon). Hope is hard right now, but I’m glad these books exist and I’m happy to support these authors and to carry some small part of their traditions so that their stories, like the olive seed, may yet survive.

ps: I know the names mentioned in YEARBOOK are heavily Western-centric. If you noticed that and are looking for a broader view of the history of our world, I recommend Bill Wurtz’s HISTORY OF THE ENTIRE WORLD, I GUESS.

pps – be sure to read that When Hope Is Hard article.