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Release date: March 24, 2009 | Age Range: 2 - 5 years
The sky’s no limit in a witty picture book about a child on a swing and the wonders of the imagination.
One child. One swing. An obliging dad. The inevitable plea to go "Higher! Higher!" Add Leslie Patricelli’s wildly expressive illustrations, and an everyday pastime reaches new heights of humor and whimsy. How high can it go? Higher than a giraffe? Taller than a mountain? Is Earth the final frontier? The creator of a popular series of board books rises to the occasion with an ingenious picture book of very few words that expresses the giddy glee of being pushed in a swing.
*Starred Review* At the playground, a little girl sits on a swing while her father pushes her to greater and greater heights: the treetops, tall buildings, a mountaintop, the clouds, and outer space. At each level, someone looks at her in a friendly way as she calls out, Higher! Higher! Finally, she sees an alien child on a swing coming from the opposite direction. The dialogue on the next three double-page spreads reads, Hi! Hi! / High five! / Bye! Bye! Then the girl swings back down to earth, back to the park, back to her father’s arms. The story ends with one word: Again! Young children hearing the ending will be echoing Again! again and again because this elemental picture book is so satisfying. What starts out as a pleasant everyday experience quickly ramps up playfully and imaginatively, taking the child out of this world to another realm, but bringing her back so quickly and safely she can’t wait to venture out again. The acrylic paintings, in which heavy black outlines boldly define shapes and intensify the colors within them, pare down the scenes to focus attention on what is essential to the story. A wonderfully simple book that’s simply wonderful for reading aloud. Preschool. --Carolyn Phelan
"My Grandma was a pastel artist and, for as long as I can remember, an artist is what I wanted to be too," says children's author and illustrator Leslie Patricelli. "My hobby as a kid was drawing cartoons and writing stories, and I started to consider a career in art in seventh grade. When the multiple choice career test I took resulted in a recommendation that I pursue a career in forestry, I went back and changed all my answers, so that it recommended instead that I pursue graphic design, which was the closest thing to children's book writer or cartoonist on the list."
Today, Leslie Patricelli's legions of fans are evidence that career tests are not always reliable. Her colorful trio of board books about opposites -- YUMMY YUCKY, BIG LITTLE, and QUIET LOUD -- follows a diapered protagonist as he discovers some curious contradictions, such as "ladies are big" while "ladybugs are little." Her inspiration for the series came from her son Beck who, at one year old, "was constantly putting everything into his mouth." Says the author, "I found myself saying 'Yummy!' and 'Yucky!' all the time. I began to draw a baby dramatically expressing his taste or distaste for the things he was eating. The idea of YUMMY YUCKY was born!"
Her other toddler books in the series, BINKY, BLANKIE, NO NO YES YES, BABY HAPPY BABY SAD, and her latest books -- TUBBY AND POTTY, were also based on her parenting experiences. "I am inspired by how passionate toddlers are," she says. "I love the way they are so extremely focused on things, and display such intense emotions. It is easy to see what they care about the most."
Leslie Patricelli's beloved baby character graduated to star in his first full-length picture book, THE BIRTHDAY BOX. She notes "I've watched my kids transform boxes into cars, boats, spaceships, hospital beds, dog carriers, snake houses, bass drums, forts, airplanes, sleds, and of course, robots. It's very exciting when a new box comes into our home."
Her book HIGHER! HIGHER! was selected as a Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards Honor Book. "I credit my daughter, Tia, for writing this book for me," says Leslie. "I was pushing her on the swing at the park when she was two, she started shouting, 'Higher! Higher!' I noticed how the other kids were saying the same thing. We started pretending that with every push I was sending her higher into the sky until she was in space. I went home with the book almost fully formed in my head."
About her latest series, which includes, THE PATTERSON PUPPIES AND THE RAINY DAY. and THE PATTERSON PUPPIES AND THE MIDNIGHT MONSTER PARTY, Patricelli says, "Although the puppies' individual personalities are based on the personalities of my own kids, the stories for these books were inspired by incidences from my own childhood. When I was four, my friend and I decided to create an ocean in her bedroom by dumping buckets of water on the floor, just like the puppies do in THE PATTERSON PUPPIES AND THE RAINY DAY. I will never forget the feeling of being caught by our parents and torn from our imaginary world to realize that we had done something very wrong! Their was no doubt in my mind that we would succeed at making an ocean. I love how a child's imagination can carry them right out of their present situation into an imaginary world that is so real to them. This is the feeling I tried to capture in the Patterson Puppies books.
"My favorite part of writing books is the moment when a new idea comes into my head," says Leslie. "If I give it my attention, a book will start forming in my mind. At this moment, I most certainly have a smile on my face."
Leslie Patricelli lives in the mountain town of Ketchum Idaho with her husband, Jason, her son, Beck, her daughters, Tia and Tatum, two cats, Oreo and Elvin, two rabbits, Olivia and Chewy and a fluctuating population of guppies. Her husband is a drummer, music engineer, ski instructor, and her on-request editor. Her kids have become her editors, whether she requests it or not!
Do you remember the excitement of being a kid on a swing set and screaming as loudly as you could to be sent higher? You were but a passenger on that crazy bus and the sky was the limit. For the little girl in this book, the sky is only the very beginning of her amazing journey upward.
Each push from her dad brings this little pig-tailed cutie to new dizzying heights. First she can see over the bushes, then over the rooftops. A few more pushes and she can see the tops of mountains, a passing airplane and how Earth appears from above. Just when you think she couldn't swing any higher, she meets a surprising new friend (no spoilers here!) before beginning her descent back to Dad.
This book is short on words, but not on emotion. The excitement is clearly evident on the little girl's face as she swings further into the sky. The first seven pages only reiterate the title "Higher! Higher!" and it's up to the reader to inject the enthusiasm. Given the illustrations of her swing progress, that's a pretty easy task.
I love that Leslie can take a everyday, mundane activity and bring to light the type of imaginative thinking that kids are capable of. The swing set might be restricted to her own backyard, but this little girl's imagination knows no bounds.
The author paragraph on the back of the dust jacket cracks me up: Leslie Patricelli lives in the mountain town of Ketchum, Idaho, with her musician husband, three inspiring children, one fat cat, one skinny cat, two fast rabbits, and a legion of well-trained sea monkeys. If that's a peep at Leslie Patricelli's sense of humor, sign me up for all her books. And I'm relieved to hear her sea-monkeys are well trained - that's the mark of a good author.
My daughter (age 4) loves books. Of our embarrassingly large collection of children's books, "Higher! Higher!" has bubbled to the top of the stack next to the bed. Like the other children's books that I'd consider great, "Higher! Higher!" doesn't rely on a complex story arc to tell its story. In fact, in this case, the author hardly relies on words at all to tell her story. It is precisely this lack of words--combined with whimsical (yet also sparse) artwork--that makes the book so compelling (dare I say "addictive"?) to kids. This book is a favorite because my daughter loves to linger on each page, discussing the possibilities that each picture holds. It is definitely not a book that just gets read to a child: there is ample room on each page for creativity to blossom, and we often spend more time reading this book than reading books with more pages. I am certain it will be the first book my daughter reads to herself (and let's be honest here: once she learned to recognize the words "higher" and "hi", she was reading the book to me). It's a fun book, a silly book, a beautiful book, and I highly recommend it.
I bought this book because my daughter loves to swing high in the playground and I encourage her to do so. The story is about a little girl who wants to go higher than a giraffe, a building, and so forth. My daughter enjoys the book tremendously and even talks about it when we are at the playground...if a book has stimulated her mind, that's about all I can ask for.
