Reviews: (by author)

Rylant, Cynthia. Little Whistle's Dinner Party. Illus. Tim Bowers. San Diego: Harcourt, 2001. ISBN 0-15-201079-3. $14.

Little Whistle's Medicine. 2002. ISBN 0-15-201086-6. $15.

In 1993, Cynthia Rylant won the Newbery Medal for Missing May. Here she's in a very different mode, crafting stories for very young readers. Little Whistle is a guinea pig, the only live being in the toy shop Toytown. But come nighttime, all the toys in the shop come to life, so LittleWhistle, himself nocturnal, has many friends, each distinct. Bear, for example, loves hats, and Lion loves vanilla cookies. The plots are very simple. For his dinner party, Little Whistle rides the toy train all over the store, inviting his pals. He takes china from the toy set, a toy oven, and a kettle back to his cage in a toy shopping cart, then goes looking for dessert. When the invitees arrive at midnight, the table is set?but where is the host? Triumphantly, he appears in a toy helicopter, bearing a box of vanilla cookies. The party is a great success.

In Little Whistle's Medicine, the toy soldier has been hurt when knocked off the shelf by a store patron. Toy Soldier is the one who reads stories to the group at night, so his absence causes the Toytown babies to cry. Little Whistle comes to the rescue with help from a mother doll who loans the guinea pig her first aid kit. Little Whistle's ministrations work and the toy soldier reads a story to him and all the babies.

The stories are sweet and the language clever: toy soldier "marches" to the party, for example. But it's the art that really makes these books extraordinary. Bowers is a gifted artist. His paintings follow the story line, yet add a great deal of charm and liveliness to Rylant's prose. Both sides of the pages are illustrated, the text side with a vignette of a character, the facing side with a full-page, detailed picture. Absolutely lovely.

Highly recommended

A.A. Nov. '02

Rylant, Cynthia. The Lighthouse Family: The Turtle. Illus. Preston McDaniels. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2005. ISBN 0-689-86244-X

Cynthia Rylant, winner of a Newbery Medal for Missing May and a Newbery Honor for A Fine White Dust, introduces the fourth book in her Lighthouse series for young readers (Grade 1-3). In this chapter book, we meet a unique family: a lighthouse keeper cat, Pandora; an old sea dog, Seabold; and three orphaned mice-Whistler, Lila, and Tiny. When winter fog engulfs the lighthouse, they work together to warn ships of the dangerous rocky cliffs. Hearing a distant cry for help, Seabold and the children find a lost, weakened sea turtle, Aurora, stranded on the slippery rocks. Unable to get Aurora up, the entire family daily cares for her: keeping her warm with heated rocks and feeding her 'baked wild potatoes, and "stir fried nettles." As the problem solver in the family, Pandora works out a solution; she calls on her friends, six strong pelicans, to carry Aurora in a rope net and return her home. Rylant's words capture the compassion and friendship within this family of cat, dog, and mice. In addition to the excellent text, Preston McDaniels' delicate pencil illustrations give a misty effect, as if we see the characters through the white fog.

Toni Rowden, January 2006

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