JC
The San Francisco Chronicle reviews The Hello, Goodbye Window, a new children’s picture book (3-7) . I’ll have to check it out, but it sounds like it could be a nice story…with the exception of the fact that “the word ‘celebrate’ is grossly overused.”

A girl catalogs all the wonderful things that happen at the big house where Nanna and Poppy live in The Hello, Goodbye Window….These grandparents make silly faces, provide homey entertainments, point out all the stars in the sky, set out great meals, play make-believe in the garden, warn against dangers and so on. Everything relates somehow to “the hello, goodbye window” in the kitchen that serves not only as the touchstone for joyous reunion and bittersweet so-longs, but also as the natural metaphor for an intimate world within and a wider one outside.

In this, his first picture book, Juster of “Phantom Tollbooth” fame strikes just the right balance between musings and amusement. As for Raschka, a Caldecott Honor winner, his lovingly loose renderings of happy childhood in a mixed-race family are nothing short of perfect. The word “celebrate” is grossly overused, but it is just the right word to describe exactly what this book does for a special relationship between doting grandparents and their lucky grandchild.