“The Kids Department loooooves this book, and so does everyone we sell it to. Great for two or three-year-olds on up to early elementary, this’d be a perfect preschool read aloud (and it often is around here). Sometimes I find books about imaginative play kind of weird, like they’re almost redundant or something. Kids know how to play make believe, and books are already fiction, so books about make believe often fall flat for me. But not Millie. For one thing, just look at her cheerful little face. Satoshi Kitamura’s illustrations are always pretty and interesting, but sometimes too busy or with too many jagged angles for me. This time, the palette is great, the faces and bodies expressive, and the story is a winner. Millie can’t afford the beautiful hat in the window of the hat store, so the man sells her a hat (for free) that ‘is a most marvellous hat, Madam . . . It can be any size, shape or color you wish. All you have to do is imagine it.’ So she goes outside, starts imagining her hat into all sorts of great things, and then moves on to imagining everyone else’s hat all through the park, until she gets home and gets her parents to imagine their own hats. I want the cake hat!”—Anna, University Book Store, Seattle
Face Out
Millie's Marvellous Hat by Satoshi Kitamura
June 5, 2011