Fuse 8 n' Kate

"Christmas was coming, and money was more scarce than ever." How we hadn't thought to do this picture book for the Christmas holiday season yet is beyond us. Betsy simply adores the Jim Henson adaptation of this book . . . and Kate loathes it. Knowing that, Betsy still gave her the book and the two discover that this is the ultimate 2020 COVID Christmas title. I mean, what other holiday book can y...

Happy Hanukkah! Having read the recent PW Children's Bookshelf announcement that a new edition of Latkes and Applesauce by Fran Manushkin is due to be republished in 2022, I thought this might be the perfect time to revisit the old book. The announcement said it was a classic, so we figured we'd check and see how well it had stood up so far. Along the way we also cover how "Big Latke" got to Kate,...

An orange fellow is told to leave over and over and over again. So it clearly has nothing to do with the state of the world today. As we mention on today’s podcast episode, when it finally occurred to Betsy to have Kate read this book, she was slightly worried that maybe it would no longer be timely. HA HA! No worries there! We go through all the political ties it has had to world leaders, and Kat...

We don't care what any of you say. Sweet potatoes shall never cross these Thanksgiving plates of ours. To celebrate the season, though we all know it's pared down terribly this year, Kate requested a Thanksgiving picture book classic. We got some great suggestions from our readers all of which Betsy is placing on the back burner for next year. That's because this year she's doing a book circa 1971...

Last week Betsy gave Kate a book so chock full of details that one listener said it was the literary equivalent of The House on the Rock. In other words, just STUFFED full of stuff. This week, Betsy went an entirely different direction. She'd been avoiding doing Freight Train by Donald Crews on the podcast for a while. Why? Because it is an exceedingly simple title. Almost pure in its limited elem...

Betsy's attempts to break Kate go nowhere this week, even when the book is being discussed is the most detail-heavy title of this podcast to date. Now Kate starts off this episode saying that she does NOT want to talk about the presidential race. Indeed, this was recorded on Thursday, and you all know how different the world was then. Quote Kate, she just wanted to do a book about "cute cats and s...

The first time Kate encountered Madeline, she did not care for her. But what if she encountered yet ANOTHER Madeline title? Would she like it better? Before selecting this week's book, Betsy hadn't remembered that there is significantly less Madeline inside of it. Will that help or hurt the book's chances of becoming a classic? Betsy and Kate spend an inordinate amount of time saying "Lord Cucufac...

I've saved the scariest book this month for last! "I'm not saying that Spooky Old Tree doesn't give you the jim-jams (because it doesn't), but ..." It's our very first Paul Galdone too! Took us long enough to get to him. As Kate says of today's book, "Well, THAT didn't end how I thought it would!" We discuss how this book relates to the film Best in Show, why my Tailypo imitation is a little too G...

Spooky season continues here on the podcast. Interestingly Betsy had never done a Chris Van Allsburg book with Kate for October before. Every year she has to come up with spooky classic picture books, and today's was a recommendation from one of the fans (that would be their mom). It's less spooky than it is autumnal, but that's okay. Show Notes: The 12-foot-tall skeleton that Home Depot was selli...

Not long ago Betsy ran across an article in the Deseret News that was called "How a breakup led to winning a Newbery Honor for this Utah author". It's all about Newbery Honor winning writer Christian McKay Heidicker (who created Scary Stories for Young Foxes and this year's Thieves of Weirdwood by "William Shivering"). In the course of the article it mentions that Mr. Heidicker has been and contin...

The spooky season begins with our first October surprise! Kate points out that this book is definitely relatable in 2020. "I'm tired of living in a hole." Aren't we all? Who wouldn't want to escape to a tropical isle? This is the book that also contains the world's saddest sentence: "I decided it was better to be alone than to be afraid." Oh, honey. Kate and Betsy talk about everything from how a...

Good Yuntif! The show has never celebrated this holiday on the show before, but this week Kate and Betsy decided to do something extra special. That something special comes in the form of special guest star, Erica Perl! And when it came to suggesting a book, the answer was this 1977 Caldecott Honor winner a.k.a. The Official Picture Book of 2020 (we hope). Show Notes: Alas, TeachingBooks.net didn'...

Another book by the man who spit in the face of the House of Un-American Activities Committee (not literally, pretty close). Our love of P.D. Eastman continues. Kate delves real real deep into the marital status of dear Mr. and Mrs. Bird here (including Mr. Bird's "extracurricular activities", if you get my gist). The women discuss how this is like a "very small version of Alfred Hitchcock's The B...

Betsy and Kate can say with complete confidence that this is the first picture book about a Black kid on the autism spectrum either have ever seen. Recently Kate saw a list from Black Education Matters listing several books that featured Black children with disabilities and she asked Betsy if any were possible for the podcast. And lo and behold, My Brother Charlie is ten years old this year. That'...

Happy Labor Day! Or, as we say on the podcast, Merry Labor Day! Today is not the first song-turned-picture-book we've done on the show (that honor went to The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night). However, it is most certainly the first (and quite possibly last) to include die-cuts. Kate wonders whether or not the "old lady" feels pissed off about being called "old" (as we attempt to sing "There was a...

First and foremost, happy engagement to Kate and the Penguinologist! She'll soon be a Coronabride with her very own microwedding. Now just to catch the rest of you up, Kate is not a huge fan of clowns. Actually, that's a bit of an understatement. She HATES clowns. Naturally that meant that Betsy had to find a classic clown book for her birthday. She's nursing a theory that they don't exist, though...

Today's book has been on Publisher Weekly's top selling picture book list for 240+ weeks. Even so, it is not a household name here in America by any stretch of the imagination. Betsy had been seeing its name on the bestseller lists for years, so she finally decided to bite the bullet and hand the title over to Kate. What results is speculation as to whether or not Gerald is dancing to dubstep (com...

While this may not be the first time we've ever covered an illustrator that I've collaborated with (remember when we discussed Dan Santat and After the Fall?) this is one of the few cases where we've done a collaborator of mine who has an honest-to-goodness classicky classic. We discuss the strength of Imogene's neck muscles, you get to hear an impromptu jingle for the Emergency Hat Service, I man...

When we consider classic Latinx picture books that would qualify as #ownvoices, only a few have been covered on this show. I mean, sure we did Pura Belpre's Perez and Martina a while ago, but let's get a little more contemporary, eh? Today's book premiered in 2000, which means it just barely squeezes in under the 20 year rule for inclusion. Now, granted, we probably should have started with the fi...

A lot of this show consists of Betsy thinking up an author (say, Patricia Polacco) then saying to herself "What's their most famous book?" In the case of Ms. Polacco, she was a bit stumped. This book was definitely in the top five, and she figured it would make for an interesting choice. Particularly since its shiny Sydney Taylor Award on the cover was intriguing. With its 1988 pub date, there's s...

If you had to pick all the Peggy Rathmann books that exist, you probably wouldn't begin with her title The Day the Babies Crawled Away (which Kate and Betsy did do on a previous episode). Instead, you'd probably want to do today's book! Is it her most famous? Dunno. Probably a toss up between this and Office Buckle and Gloria. Today Kate and Betsy dig deep into a title that certainly contains the...

"Bring me a bad book. Like, a really good bad book." So Kate asked Betsy. Well, we don't want to give anything away but Betsy may have hit on something. If you were born in the late 70s or early 80s, the odds are good that somebody you know read it to you. And this all ties in quite closely to current discussions of picture books with racist elements that sit blithely on shelves in children's room...

Betsy didn't want to have a whole conversation about elongated eye tubes. She really, really didn't, but that's the price you pay when you show Kate the book Owl Babies. Today the two tackle the ebook edition of the picture book (rather than board book) version of this title and it makes for an interesting read. They end up wondering about where the gutter falls on certain two-page spreads, and ha...

Funny to think about the authors and illustrators we've never quite gotten to on the show. Sometimes the trick behind selecting a book isn't so much which artist to do but what book to do from a given artist. After much soul searching Betsy decided that George Shrinks trumps Dinosaur Bob and the Family Lazardo in terms of sheer fame. It's a funny kind of book, and you can trust Kate to winnow out...

Betsy broke the rules. Under normal circumstances she won't consider a children's book for this podcast unless that title is less than 20 years old. But since she made that rule in the first place, I guess she's the one who gets to break it. And today's book is, in its blood, a rule breaker. In the course of this episode Betsy attempts to encapsulate all of Jacqueline Woodson's major awards (this...