Friday, June 6, 2014

Chu's Day

Chu's Day
by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Adam Rex


Chu is a young panda with a fantastic aviator's cap and goggles who lives in a world surrounded by a wide variety of other anthropomorphic animals. He goes about his day visiting the library with his mum and having lunch in a diner with his papa, always on the verge of sneezing. That evening at the circus when his mighty sneeze finally comes, it ravages his town, leaving chaos and mayhem in its wake.

We all know Neil Gaiman from his multiple genre titles, graphic novels, and YA books. He's also a fantastic children's author, telling a simple yet imaginative story in Chu's DayGaiman's text is leavened by hilariously realistic, absurdist images of whale short order cooks, porcine clowns, and leonine lion tamers. My son has had this book for over a year and he still falls out of my lap laughing, every time we read it.

Chu's Day, by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Adam Rex

3 comments:

  1. Hey, to answer your question you posted on my blog:

    Picture books have page counts divisible by 8 because all books do–it is, as you guessed, an artifact of the printing process we have. Longer books generally have a page count divisible by 16, if I'm not mistaken, because pages are sewn into the book in groups of 16.
    As to why most picture books are 32 or 40 pages, that's just the influence of the market. Shorter books supposedly don't do well because buyers don't think they're worth the price. Parents don't want to read longer books at bedtime, so those don't get sold either, even at the same price as a 32 page book. Or so I'm told.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. As an often tired parent, with an often tired little boy, I can understand the downward pressure on total book size. I appreciate your little bit of insight into the underlying mechanics of the publishing world.

      Thanks!

      Delete
    2. And here's the blog post that Adam was referring to:
      http://adamrex.blogspot.com/2013/04/how-i-make-picture-book.html

      Delete