More birthday and why we love Peter Sís

She has now memorized almost every page in this Cat book. "Cool cat, copy cat...swish swish swish."

Here she is with a book by our new favorite author Peter Sís. We also have The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain and The Three Keys, which is about his childhood in Prague and his subsequent exhile from it. Of course we love the whole Eastern European history thing (with kids named Katerina and Alexander that can't be too much of a surprize). But we love the way he tells a story and how one book can be appropriate to a wide age range. Madlenka is on one hand a simple story about a little girl and loosing a tooth. But the captions add a whole level of multi-cultural content as she travels around her neigborhood and describes the people she meets. The Wall really is for older kids (us) but like all of them you can pick and choose whether to read just the story line or the story line and captions or even a part of the additional text on each page. The drawings work the same way. I looked for a long time at the page in The Three Keys where there is a ghostly image of tanks rolling on Prague in 1968 and when I found it it only added another level to the story. I wish I wasn't so tired or I might write this more eloquently. Seriously, check him out. His home page http://www.petersis.comWikipeda http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sis

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