Around the World With Mouk by Marc Boutavant

I still need to post about the National Book Award events but all week long I haven't been able to get it together to put up a long post full o' photos that somehow does justice to it all. Now I'm typing one-handed with a precious Clementine on my lap, curved like a little comma around my body, so I think I'll just put up a quickie post to rave about a picture book I got yesterday in Seattle:
Around the World With Mouk, by Marc Boutavant, pub. Chronicle Books.

I LOVE this book, so much so that I bought three copies -- one for me Clementine and two for gifts. It's a big colorful book of fun by French illustrator Marc Boutavant, whose art I'd only seen previously on stickers. His style is of the hyper-busy scenes crammed with silly detail that will make kids (and Laini) want to spend many long minutes on each spread. Kind of like Richard Scarry, but way cooler. In the book this little bear named Mouk travels around the world and each spread is a different country, populated by the indigenous species and with dozens of tiny speech bubbles that are both funny and educational, teaching about language, culture, nature and food of places like Madagascar, Finland, China, etc . Here's a spread (India):
And if it's not already cool enough, there are stickers! A couple pages of awesome stickers to put where you want throughout the book. I must confess, I'm just itching to use them. It will be a remarkable feat of self-denial if I manage to save the stickers for when Clementine is bigger! Ha ha!

Love it. I got another book illustrated by Boutavant at the same store -- All Kinds of Families --
-- and I'll be on the lookout for more, like this one:

I'll be back soon with NBA stuff!