New Oz Poster by Brian Floca

Books on Tape is offering a poster of the art that Brian Floca created for a new audio edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. This page provides an email address for people who want a free poster—while supplies last, presumably.

Brooke Shields recorded this edition, and Paul Rudd read the “introduction.” I don’t know if that means L. Frank Baum’s note before the novel, but here it is:

Folklore, legends, myths and fairy tales have followed childhood through the ages, for every healthy youngster has a wholesome and instinctive love for stories fantastic, marvelous and manifestly unreal. The winged fairies of Grimm and Andersen have brought more happiness to childish hearts than all other human creations.

Yet the old time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as ”historical” in the children’s library; for the time has come for a series of newer “wonder tales” in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale. Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.

Having this thought in mind, the story of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” was written solely to please children of today. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.

As critics have noted, Baum actually created an American legend with plenty of heartaches and nightmares included, not to mention morals. But he was working in marketing at the time.

To the Moon and Back

Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11, by Brian Floca, is an excellent nonfiction picture book retelling the history of the first human mission to the Moon.

The prose is tight and poetic, its tone a mix of matter-of-fact and awestruck. Pages jump between the astronauts in space, mission control back on Earth, and a family watching the action on their living room TV. This history doesn’t dig back into the geopolitics of the space race, or ahead to the end of lunar missions; it focuses on that human achievement of July 1969.

I enjoyed watching how Floca used his art and design to pace his story. The first illustration after the text starts is a landscape on Earth with the Moon as a distant crescent in the sky. Floca frames this round image in the blank white page, both opening the book slowly and symbolizing how this life is limited to Earth.

Later that image’s blue, green, and white colors make a visual rhyme for the image of a round Earth in the black sky that we finally see at the end of the astronauts' visit to the Moon. And as a coda, the book’s final illustration is also a round landscape, blue and green. But now there’s a full Moon overhead, and the family we’ve seen throughout the book is running across the grass.

Floca breaks down the rocket countdown into six rectangular panels on one spread, ticking off the seconds. Turn the page, and the liftoff is the first full page spread of the book.

Even the endpapers in Moonshot get put to use, in different ways. The front set shows the stages of the lunar rocket while the back set retells the history in more detailed prose suitable for school-report research.

Of course, this is a journey many books have taken before. There’s a lot of source material about the lunar missions, and a built-in market. Moonshot even got published on the fortieth anniversary of the landing. Last year’s Cybils Non-Fiction Picture Book winner, The Day-Glo Brothers, got points from us judges for being the very first book on its topic. But Moonshot is also terrific, and deserves the other awards it’s brought home.