What’s that you say? The holidays are so, like, over? OK, duly noted. But for my first real KL post, I’m going to share one of the books I gave Thalia for Christmas ‘09. Mind you, in the past couple of weeks I’ve compiled quite a list of ideas for future KL exploration, but my favorite of our newest additions seems as good and simple a place to start as any.

A Penguin Story, by Antoinette Portis

Harper Collins

40 pp.

PERFECT FOR: Dreamers, people who want to move away from home, people who have moved away from home, eternal seekers, the insatiably curious, those who bore easily, fans of the color orange, fans of the color green, fans of penguins.

We were already big fans of Portis’s first book, Not a Box, so when I saw this new one from her on The New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books 2009 list, it didn’t take me long to decide it’d be one of our Christmas adoptees. And I was in love on first read—in love with Portis’s simple, bold illustrations, rough and clean at the same time; in love with the story, which follows penguin Edna, weary of her home turf, as she looks for that “something else” that she knows must be out there, somewhere. The other penguins just want to play penguin games, but Edna is devoted to her search. And yep, her devotion pays off. Color represents the “something else”: Edna’s North Pole home is exclusively white, black, and blue, and what she finds—the tents and parkas, etc. of a team of research scientists—is brilliant orange.

She shares her discovery with the rest of her penguin crew, and the birds delight in their encounter with the scientists, who offer them an orange glove as a souvenir. But on the final page, Edna, our dear seeker of new experience, stands atop an icy outlook, wearing the orange glove as a jester hat, staring out at the blue, blue sea. “The next day, Edna wonders, What else could there be?” Behind her, on the facing page, a green boat is inching its way onto the horizon. The book’s end papers? Orange (front) and green (back).

I’m sure I don’t have to go on at length about how the theme of this book—the eternal search for the “something else”—should thrill any thinking adult. You’ll get it. That’s mainly why I’ve flipped over it, though it’d be a beautiful winner based on its look and design alone. A kid’s book that feeds the noisy adult mind’s need for meaning as well as it feeds its intended kiddo reader is a rare thing (rarer, maybe, than animated films that do the same?), and this is an exquisite example. And Thalia? She’s hooked too, on those sweet little penguins and the wide swaths of color and the pleasing geometry of each gorgeous page. And she wasted no time learning to see, and point out, the green boat…

I’ve already given A Penguin Story as a gift twice, and frankly, it’s killing me that I can’t show you every. single. page right now. It’s that good. (You can see a few pages, though not my absolute faves, here.)

(”I’ll never get tired of looking, thinks Edna.”)