THE APPLE PIE THAT PAPA BAKED

You can always tell when the cooks have added a special touch of TLC to a recipe. In this case, a could-have-been standard cumulative tale of a fatherly farmer collecting apples and baking a pie is made extraordinary by its fine folk art/folksong sensibilities, its particularly appetizing apple-pie palette of crusty golden-brown, buttery cream, apple-red and cast-iron black and by the artist’s inspired use of line. Bean’s art, which he acknowledges is “strongly influenced by the work of Virginia Lee Burton and Wanda Gag,” is a lively and life-full song of its own, an organic and curvilinear concoction in which circles of visual narrative build upon each other just as Thompson’s toothsome text builds upon itself, until readers are cuddled up in a homespun, apple-shaped embrace. Thompson again proves herself a master of mixing up a treat—warm, sweet and satisfying; Bean, who explains his multi-step creative process in a note, is someone to watch. (Picture book. 5-8)