Regards to the Man in the Moon

Regards to the Man in the Moon by Ezra Jack Keats is the fourth of the Louie books. Louie is upset because the neighborhood kids have been teasing his father, calling him a junk man. So he and Louie conspire to show them the importance of reusing and upcycling.

Louie and his step dad get to work to make a neighborhood version of Verne and Méliès's masterpiece. They make their rocket ship out of cardboard and other materials left in the scrap yard. As the children get wrapped up in their project and then in the playtime, Keats's illustrations switch more and more to showing what they are imagining.

As the daughter of an antiques dealer, I could relate to the teasing Louie received. Every vacation we went on, we invariably ended up show more visiting local dumping sites for those forgotten (and free!) gems that could be fixed up and sold (for profit!) Locally there were the estate sales (morbid but kind of fun, see Bad Houses by Sara Ryan. And worse of all, there was the occasional Dumpster diving. show less

Louie is unhappy when his friends call his dad the junkman. But his father has a secret: he knows it just takes imagination for that stuff to take a person right out of this world.

Louie gets to work building Imagination I . . . a spaceship fueled solely by imagination . . . and blasts off to an amazing adventure.

This book, from Caldecott Medal winner Ezra Jack Keats, is a Reading Rainbow selection that celebrates the young reader’s inventiveness with a fantastical tale of inspiration, friendship, and creativity. The target audience is first and second graders, ages five through nine. With its colorful, chimerical illustrations of planets and outer space, the touching tale dazzles both the eyes and the imagination. Young readers are show more sure to return to this story again and again.

Highly recommended. show less

Ezra Jack Keats is a classic picture book author. Your library isn't complete without at least a few of his books.

This one is less well-known, I think, than some of the others such as The Snowy Day... and I'm not very surprised.

The story itself is great. A kid is teased for his father owning a junkyard, and his parents help him use the junk to build a pretend spaceship... so he and some of the other kids pretend to travel through space, and the story is built up with what they pretend to see. Great!

Except I found it a little moralizing. Louie talks actively about "using our imagination" and "don't you have any imagination" and "they thought they ran out of imagination", and we're explicitly told that the two kids who "ran out of show more imagination" found themselves unable to move in their make-believe world (probably because they weren't really moving, but let's not go there). I don't hear children speaking like this in real life. It sounds more like teacher-talk than like child-talk to me - children are more likely to say "let's pretend" or "let's make like" - or to even just go ahead and *do* it. And if they can't come up with something, they say that or let somebody else make things up instead of bemoaning their lack of imagination.

It's still a good book, and a good addition to your library, but I prefer The Pet Show or Whistle for Willie instead. show less

The story and illustrations in this book are beautiful.

Louie is the son of a "junk" man and his wife. Who is teased because of his parents career in junk. His father teaches him to see past the pile as just junk and use his imagination to travel to outer space.

I loved Susie...the brave girl that steps forward to ask if she can travel to space with Louie. He tells her it all depends..."got lots of imagination?"

Reminds me of summer days of my youth where the couch became a ship and the red carpet was lava.

Celebrates imagination.

I don't know why I never heard of this before - my boys and I would have loved this when they were young. Exciting, with art that one can spend a lot of time looking at. And also it would have been so good for us, making it clear just why imagination is so important (it can make the most mundane into something wonderful, and can also help solve problems). Highly recommended as good for all.

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are three that I love that are also inspirational. Please add your favorites to the comments, and remind me to find or make a Listopia.

I, as a reader, and I'm sure many other readers, tend to be more passive and less creative. Books like this that are truly inspirational are valuable. Yes, there are a lot that talk about celebrating creativity, but very few actually provide enough scaffolding. show less

The way Louie stands by what he likes to do even though other kids make fun of him shows students that is okay to be different. Keats does a good job of showing that sometimes if you do what you like regardless of other's opinions the people may actually like what you like.

Following the marriage of Barney and Louie's mother in the book, Louie's Search, the readers get to know these characters a little more. The kids at school often make fun of Barney because of his profession. They view as the "junkman". Barney tells Louie that it is not junk if you use your imagination. Together with the neighborhood children, they build a spaceship and fly out to space. Louie and his copilot, Susie, are surprised to see Ziggie and Ruthie in outer space. Ziggie and Ruthie cry out to them to be saved. Louie said only imagination can save them. Sure enough, the ordinary rocks turned into monsters and all the children were able to escape and land safely back down to Earth. In any tough situation, children use their show more imagination to "save" them. It is a common mechanism on dealing with problems that are too difficult. Also, when you change a negative thing such as "junk" into something positive such as "a spaceship", magical things happen. show less