B-112

Molly Coxe

Little Cricket loves to hop, snap, tap, and chirp, but he’s been feeling ignored and stymied since the arrival of Baby Cricket. So he decides to run away. He buys a ticket on a rocket ship and visits Planet One, Planet Two, and Planet Three, but ends up finding fault with all of them. When he returns home his family pays attention to him and appreciates him again. Molly’s pictures, done digitally, have a loose ink line (think Quinten Blake) on top of very bold color and varied textures. Her verse is a mix of couplets and four-line rhymes, and feels natural and rhythmic.

A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Molly Coxe (born 1959) grew up with “a lot of free time.” She spent much of that time in nature, exploring and creating. She studied English at Princeton University, and followed that with a year and a half of art school. In the early 1980s she taught preschool at the Walden School in New York, and found herself inspired by her students love of dictate simple stories for her to transcribe. She married writer Craig Canine in 1984, and the couple moved to his family farm in Iowa, where they started a family. Molly set up a studio in a renovated schoolhouse on their property, and began to carve out a career as an author/illustrator.

Her first book, Louella and the Yellow Balloon, was published by Harper in 1988. In 1991, The Great Snake Escape was published as part of the I Can Read! line (which, now that she has a Beginner Book as well, puts her in the rarified group of creators who have done books for both major early reading lines). A series of Step Into Reading books for Random House established her reputation as having a remarkable talent for writing early readers. Her philosophy is right in line with the classic Beginner Book approach laid out by Ted, Helen, and Phyllis: “Easy words! Let the images do a lot of the work. Funny is good.”

In recent years Molly has made her home in northern California, and she has started creating photo-illustrated books populated with sculpt needle-felt animals. They’re published by Kane Press’s Bright Owl Books imprint.

Though A Ticket for Cricket is her first official Beginner Book, Molly’s 1999 Step Into Reading book Six Sticks was retrofitted as one for the book club edition. But even Molly seems to not count this, and her very sweet dedication in Cricket acknowledges the significance of becoming a Beginner Book author. It reads,  “This book is dedicated to my adorable dad, age ninety-three, who read me Beginner Books when I was little.” 

B-114

Bob Staake

I Can Be Anything! is another showcase for the talented lizard that Bob Staake introduced in Can You See Me? (2019; B-108). In the first book, it showed off its skills at subterfuge, camouflaging itself in a variety of different settings. In the new book, the lizard ups the ante by transforming itself into a dizzying array of vehicles (train, boat, blimp), structures (lighthouse, slide, house in a tree), creatures (panda, robot), and objects (weather vane, tuba, famous works of art).

Just as Can You See Me? owed its biggest debt to Robert Lopshire's Put Me In the Zoo (a creature demonstrates its color-changing abilities to two enthusiastic children), I Can Be Anything! is indebted to that book's sequel, I Want to Be Something New (the creature turns into different shapes). But where Lopshire's book takes a dubious path to a moral of self-acceptance, Bob's is a celebration of the power of imagination and possibility ("What's the thing you want to be? / DO IT! TRY IT! / Then you'll see.")

The book's verse is presented in naturally-flowing couplets and triplets ("Look at me fly! / I'm a plane way up high! / I'm a green-headed monster with a giant red eye"), but the greatest joy comes from Bob's bright, funny pictures. Working in a geometric style most indebted to UPA animation, the writer/artist seems to have equal amounts of fun contorting the lizard (which is always recognizable as itself, even in the different shapes it takes on) as he does with the little details, such as a nauseous merry-go-round rider, or a panda giving the lizard some serious side-eye.