Notes From Your BooksellerPicture books are fun for many reasons. They take us to far off places but also help us look inside ourselves. They're the perfect form of entertainment, but what happens if your picture book has limitations? The cat in Charise Mericle Harper's I Cannot Draw a Horse really wants a horse, but the quick-draw book, which, if you haven't guessed from the title, can't draw a horse! The book has a few tricks up its sleeve, and with some art lessons to be taught along the way, both cat and reader will be left entertained.
Award-winning author and illustrator Charise Mericle Harper delivers a fantastically funny picture book about doing the impossible: drawing a horse. A children’s metafiction book about creativity and imaginative play centered around an art lesson, Harper cleverly shows readers how drawings are a collection of recognizable shapes put together to create something new. Elementary-aged readers will delight as the simple “nothing shape” becomes a cat, a squirrel, a beaver, a bunny, a dog, a turtle, and a bear. But what about a horse? The cat really wants a horse. But . . . the book cannot draw a horse. Can the quick-draw book appease the horse-obsessed cat with an impressive collection of horse-y alternatives (all created from the same “nothing shape”)? Or will the cat finally get a horse?
Harper’s quirky, contemporary voice and kid-friendly comic illustration style is on full display in this hilarious picture book with art education appeal. I Cannot Draw a Horse invites young readers into the narrative fun, as do such modern classics as Press Here by Hervé Tullet, Never Let a Unicorn Scribble by Diane Alber and The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt.
Hardcover picture book; 48 pages; 10 x 10 in.