This Is Not My Hat (2013 Caldecott Medal Award)

From the creator of the bestselling and award-winning I Want My Hat Back comes a second wry tale.

When a tiny fish shoots into view wearing a round blue top hat (which happens to fit him perfectly), trouble could be following close behind. So it's a good thing that enormous fish won't wake up. And even if he does, it's not as though he'll ever know what happened, will he. Visual humour swims to the fore as the bestselling Jon Klassen follows his break-out debut with another deadpan-funny tale.

A simple story for a picture book. This seems to be the main the premise for most picture books. This Is Not My Hat at its core is exactly that: an extremely simple moral story, only told in a highly interesting picture format.

I believe this book is essentially art for children to admire, or at least grow up to admire if they are too small to appreciate art at the moment. Each page and spread illustrates the story of the fish who steals a hat from another fish. The reader will not notice how the author-illustrator has actually given his characters movement and expression with merely the changing of their eye placements and the amount of bubbles that appear in each spread. And how the underwater plants subtly change in position from one page to the next, of course.

Spotting details is a great family activity and this book is good for parents to read with their children as this book is ripe with possibilities for many, many discussions to come with each sitting. What is the actual story that the pictures tell instead of what the narrating fish wants us to know, how do the children feel about the ending, and perhaps most importantly, how anyone should always be careful about knowingly doing wrong to someone else...