B-118

Michelle Meadows and Sawyer Cloud

How to Love a Pony is about a girl named Lily who lives on a farm that raises ponies. Lily gives the reader a tour of the farm, and tells how she helps to take care of the ponies throughout the year.

How to Love a Pony is both remarkable and unremarkable. As an early reader, it doesn’t break new ground. It’s told in rhyming couplets (“Soapy water in a pail. / Gentle strokes from head to tail.”) It doesn’t have a plot, nor is it a return to the logical insanity of the Beginner Books heyday. It’s not even the first Beginner Book to feature a pony (that would be 1961’s Little Black, A Pony ).

But in other ways it’s a pioneering work. For one, it features a full cast of Black characters, something that wouldn’t be a big deal if not for the fact that Beginner Books were notoriously slow in embracing diversity. For another, it was created by a Black writer and a Black artist, a first for Beginner Books on both counts, and one that’s long-overdue.

Author Michelle Meadows (born circa 1970) has been writing children’s picture books for 20 years. As a child growing up in Washington, D.C., she counted Judy Blume and Shel Silverstien as her favorite authors, and was especially drawn to poetry. She attended Syracuse University and majored in journalism and literature. She wrote her first book - The Way the Storm Stops (Henry Holt 2003) - after comforting her two-year-old son during a thunderstorm. Since then she has published several books of fiction (Pilot Pups; Piggies in the Kitchen) and nonfiction (Brave Ballerina: The Story of Janet Collins). She currently makes her home in Delaware.

Illustrator Sawyer Cloud was born, raised, and still lives in Madagascar. After college she worked as a first grade teacher, but eventually quit to make art her full time career. The gamble paid off, and she has now done work for every major publisher in the U.S. Her work, created digitally, has the brightness, simplicity, and slight abstraction of classic Little Golden Book illustrators. The style is a perfect match for the subject matter of How to Love a Pony, giving the book a pleasantly pastoral and bucolic atmosphere.

B-119

Marilyn Sadler and Tim Bowers

The P.J. FunnyBunny renaissance continues! In this outing, the rascally P.J. learns to be more thoughtful and caring toward his friends and family. The story begins listing all the ways P.J. is too busy to be considerate. He leaves the door open when he goes out of the house, he doesn’t put away his dirty dishes, he borrows things from his friends and doesn’t return them, and he won’t watch the new Hoppy Bunny movie with his sister Honey Bunny.

But then he hurts his ankle playing baseball. P.J. is so touched by how kind everyone is while he recovers that he decides to try it for himself. And he finds that when he cleans up after himself, clears the table, returns his friends’ items, and watches movies with his sister it makes him feel good.

Sadler uses prose that’s simple but natural, and laced with sly humor. For example, when Ritchie Racoon asks where his baseball mitt is, P.J. says he’ll bring it tomorrow. “But that was what P.J. said yesterday,” the narrator reveals.

Meanwhile, Tim Bowers does another bang-up job of replicating original artist Roger Bollen’s cartoony style.

While this book isn’t as layered and satisfying as It’s Better Being a Bunny, it’s still an enjoyable entry in the P.J. FunnyBunny series. Here’s hoping for more.