Product Description

Every day, children the world over sing, shout, and celebrate Mother Goose rhymes. And now there's a new reason to cheer: Nina Crews has added her own remarkable, jazzy style of illustration to a collection of forty-one favorite verses. Whether it's Jack jumping over a candlestick (atop a cupcake), Georgie Porgie kissing the girls (at the playground), or a fine lady riding a white horse (on the carousel), this exuberant treasury is sure to be read and enjoyed over and over again.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #212254 in Books
• Published on: 2004-01-01
• Released on: 2003-12-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 64 pages

From Booklist
*Starred Review* PreS. Nina Crews' clear, beautiful color photographs and computer manipulations bring children close-up to people like them. In this modern Mother Goose, she uses computer tools to combine photos of joyful kids in her Brooklyn neighborhood with all kinds of scenarios, realistic and wild. In "Hey diddle diddle!" a brooding cat holding a violin watches a boy running on the sidewalk, while a silver spoon looms over a wooden fence and a cow walks in the air above a full moon. In contrast, the illustration for "Pat-a-Cake" is homey and real: two girls clap hands in a front of a bakery window. The child's sense of being small in a world of giants is beautifully captured in the double-page spread of tiny kids jumping in a giant shoe. Realism, of course, has never been part of the Mother Goose nonsense drama, but preschoolers will enjoy seeing kids like themselves in pictures that make the familiar rhymes part of imaginative fun on the city sidewalk, where girls and boys come out to ride their scooters and bikes, play ball, and dream. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Nina Crews drew inspiration from her Brooklyn neighborhood in creating the artwork for The Neighborhood Mother Goose. Nina's best-selling titles include One Hot Summer Day (Sesame Street Parents "Kid Hits" selection) and Snowball (a CCBC choice). Twice her acclaimed works have been selected as "Best of the Best" books of the year by the Chicago Public Library.

Nina Crews grew up in New York City. After graduating from Yale University in 1985, she worked in commercial animation production and contributed illustrations to magazines, including the Village Voice and Parenting.

In her own words....

"I look back to move forward on a new children's book. I try to remember a much younger me and recreate some of the things that delighted me then. These pleasures were often quite simple, perhaps the shape or taste of something or the colors that it evoked—and everything was set against a noisy, busy, city backdrop.

"I was raised in New York City. I think I've always loved it. There may have been more tall buildings than trees, but I enjoyed the city and all its variety. The people, the neighborhoods, all of the city's quirkiness were endlessly exciting.

"I started taking pictures at an early age, and the city was my first subject. I grew up in a family of artists and saw the children's-book business firsthand. My parents, Donald Crews and Ann Jonas, always encouraged my sister and me in all our art projects. I had wellrounded art training in high school but became more focused on photography in college. Since then I have been working in commercial animation production and doing freelance photo-collage illustration.

"I love making collages. Some of my favorite artists—Romare Bearden, Hannah Hoch, and Man Ray—combined photography and collage. Collage allows me to use photography playfully and to tell a story on many levels.

"I enjoy photographing children. The interaction always adds something to the project; their performances always give me new ideas. I try to keep the photography session as loose as possible. Collaging the images allows me a great deal of freedom. Basically, almost anything can happen.

"Writing the text is another kind of challenge. I try to find a good balance between the written story and the visual story. Each one should help the other. Picture books are the combination of two forms of poetry, written and visual, and their flow should be musical. I find myself reading a lot of poetry while I work on ideas.

"As a child I loved books and I loved to look. The more there was to see in any one image, the better. I also loved books that were set in city places. I hope that a new generation will get these same pleasures from my books."

Customer Reviews

The Neighborhood Mother Goose
This is the fifth copy of this book that I have purchased for myself and as gifts. I am a mother, grandmother as well as being a preschool teacher for 30 years. The children in my class just love nursery rhymes and repeat them and fill in the word if I pause at the end of a line. I just love the pictures and this makes the rhymes more realistic in this day and age.

New Take on Old Rhymes
The Neighborhood Mother Goose has the text of common nursery rhymes accompanied by photo collages that depict children acting out the rhymes in an urban setting. Contemporary children, adults, pets and clothes are all used together to create interesting, visually stimulating collages of various photographs that are often transposed, enlarged or shrunken, and overlapped, so that, for instance, many real children appear to really be living in a big shoe! This interesting update on classic nursery rhymes is a good way to offer a different perspective on the old tales, while still teaching the child culture. This book would be recommended for toddlers and young school-age children, for those that live in an urban area and will recognize the setting, or for those children who live elsewhere and can see what city life is like. Either way, it's a unique way to depict familiar tales in a new and fascinating way- through real life photographs, not old-fashioned paintings. This book was nominated as a Notable Book by the American Library Association.

Multicultural
Excellent multicultural pictures - all shades of children and a nice collection of rhymes.