The world of children’s books is an unbelievably capacious place, and anyone who doubts it should take a look at this month’s two offerings, standing as they do at opposite ends of a continuum. One has to love an art form so malleable it makes room for this much variation - it also helps explain why children’s book librarians are among the happiest and best-read people on earth.
Parked very nearly at the beginning of the young reader’s spectrum is a nearly wordless picture-book tour de force by an author with the unlikely nom de plume of “Mr. Warburton’’ (né Thomas Warburton) - creator of popular television cartoons including “Codename: Kids Next Door.’’ “1000 Times No’’ is Warburton’s first children’s book, but one hopes it will not be his last. Picture books live somewhere between the speed of a poem and a painting, yet possess all the seeming power of a novel - often within fewer than 100 words, and Warburton gets it just right. The plot line, such as it is, could not be simpler. A mother tells her diapered child, “All right, Noah, dear. It’s time to leave,’’ and the child pitches a tantrum with more than three dozen linguistic and visual variations of the word no. Some get full pages, but most are divvied up into comic-strip style panels. Among my favorites are pig latin (“oh-nay’’), complete with pig snout; Morse code; cowboy (“nooooope’’); robot (“negative’’); zulu (“tsha’’), with mask; tricycle license plate; standing with back turned and saying it backwards; skywriting; spelling it out in peas on a plate; hurling it discus-style in ancient Greek. Even his name, Noah, contains the no word.
