Media Macaroni

Amy Krouse Rosenthal is one of those people who notices the little delightful details in words and pictures. When she spoke at the BookExpo Children’s Book breakfast, she talked about how you can move one letter to make reaction into creation. She showed us how to turn OK on its side to make a person. 

As she signed her latest books to Olive, she said, “O, live!” One of those books is Duck! Rabbit! Amy Krouse Rosenthal is just the right person to make a children’s book about a single optical illusion. She cleverly presents both sides of the argument, is it a duck or is it a rabbit? Olive firmly insists it’s a rabbit. 

Amy Krouse Rosenthal is also the author of the Little Book series. This series plays a game of reverse psychology with young readers. Little Pea has to eat all of his sweets or he won’t be able to have any vegetables for dessert. Little Hoot has to stay up all night long, because that’s what owls do. All he really wants to do, though, is get to bed at a reasonable hour. I was delighted to take home the latest in the series, Little Oink, who hates mess up time. Why can’t he clean up his room like all of his friends? Poor Little Oink. 

Not until the BEA breakfast did I connect the author of these sweet books to the creator of two videos that captured my imagination last summer. I happened upon her video for 17 Things I Made, which is like a beautiful love poem to everyday life. 

From that I arrived at The Beckoning of Lovely, the result of the invitation at the end of the 17 Things I Made video. I can’t watch this without turning on the waterworks. 

In her talk and in her work, Amy Krouse Rosenthal reminds us that we have a limited time on this planet, so we should make something lovely. 

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 31st, 2009 at 9:33 am and is filed under Books, Web Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.