Toon Books – Page 3 – Mom Read It

If you’ve got kids, I hope by now you’ve introduced them to comic books. When I was a kid, kids’ comics meant Richie Rich, Casper, and Archie. Now? There are virtually hundreds of titles to get kids started on a love of graphic, sequential storytelling.

Toon Books is a great resource for parents and educators that want to get more graphic novels into their little ones’ lives. I have a pretty nice collection of Toon Books in my library, including Jeff Smith’s Little Mouse Gets Ready. You read that right – Bone’s Jeff Smith does comics for Toon. Quality creators making quality comics.

Today, though, I’m talking Benny and Penny, the brother and sister mouse series also published by Toon and written by Geoffrey Hayes, who also won a Theodor Seuss Geisel Award for the series back in 2010. The siblings’ newest adventure, Benny and Penny in Lost and Found, hits shelves on August 5th, and is an adorable addition to the series.

Read more of my review over at WhatchaReading and pre-order your copy of Benny and Penny in Lost and Found here!

I was lucky enough to review an advance copy of the upcoming Neil Gaiman/Lorenzo Mattotti graphic retelling of Hansel & Gretel for WhatchaReading. Check out my excerpt here:

I’m on a fairy tale kick these days. Call it an occupational hazard – my secret identity is that of a not-so-mild mannered children’s librarian, after all – but lately, a good fairy tale just hits the spot. I’m not talking unicorns barfing rainbows, though – I’m talking proper Grimm Fairy Tales, which is really where horror movies probably began.

Actually, the Grimm Brothers get a lot of credit for freaky-scary fairy tales, but most fairy tales in their original aspects have some gruesome aspects to them – Cinderella’s stepsisters cut off their toes to try to wedge that glass slipper on their feet in the original tale. Puss ‘N Boots used subterfuge and murder to get his pal a castle and lands of his own. Shards from the Snow Queen’s frozen mirror pierced people’s eyes and hearts and froze them from the inside. (Both Cinderella and Puss were written by Charles Perrault, and The Snow Queen was written by Hans Christian Andersen.) Fairy tales were kind of like terrifying Aesop’s Fables back in the day; the Middle Ages parenting way of saying, “If you cross without looking both ways, you’ll get hit by a bus!” but a lot more creative.

Check out the rest of my review at WhatchaReading, and make sure to pre-order your copy today!

Tag: Toon Books

Benny and Penny in Lost and Found – A WhatchaReading Review!

Neil Gaiman’s Hansel & Gretel – A WhatchaReading Review!