A Hat Tip to 4 New Picture Books

THE UPSIDE DOWN HAT
By Stephen Barr
Illustrated by Gracey Zhang

COURAGE HATS
By Kate Hoefler
Illustrated by Jessixa Bagley

MAE MAKES A WAY
The True Story of Mae Reeves, Hat & Historical past Maker
By Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich
Illustrated by Andrea Pippins

KAT HATS
By Daniel Pinkwater
Illustrated by Aaron Renier

Why did Stephen Sondheim, the best lyricist musical theater has ever recognized, use the phrase hat a lot, from a music bleakly mulling whether or not anybody nonetheless wears them to “Ending the Hat,” a mission assertion for the soul in “Sunday within the Park With George”? No deeper that means there, Sondheim insisted, after a critic famous the recurrence: “It’s the jaunty tone and the convenience in rhyming that entice me,” he wrote in “Look, I Made a Hat,” his second quantity of annotated verses.

Effectively, positive, hat rhymes with a lot of satisfying phrases, together with fats, flat, mat, splat, sat and cat, as Dr. Seuss, an amazing lover of hats who gave Bartholomew Cubbins 500 of them, made plain. The rhymability alone makes it good materials for an image ebook in addition to a musical. However a hat will be deeply symbolic, too, as Sondheim properly knew (in “Sunday,” it stands for nothing lower than artwork itself). Jon Klassen confirmed this in his lauded Hat Trilogy, and so do a barbershop quartet of latest books with wildly completely different tones.

In “The Upside Down Hat,” a lullingly spare story by Stephen Barr with beautiful, Bemelmans-like illustrations by Gracey Zhang, a hat turns into a bit of boy’s total assist system. He’s nameless, although the names of his all of the sudden absent two finest pals, Henry and Priscilla, and environment of palm timber and pillars counsel he as soon as occupied a world of lush privilege. Waking up one morning, he discovers all his possessions, together with shiny orange stilts, are gone, apart from this one essential accent.

What’s a hat’s important function? To guard the pinnacle, which this one does: from the solar beating down, and the rain. However instantly it flips, just like the well-known optical phantasm that reveals a younger or previous girl relying in your perspective, and turns into a container: for ingesting water, for cherries, for begged cash. After an extended day of resourcefully going through his decreased circumstances, the boy goes to the highest of a mountain, sleeps and goals, falling right into a form of valley of the shadow the place his misplaced issues are restored to him, and but are not what is basically wanted. When he wakes up, he’ll have new cause for optimism. With contrails of “The Little Prince” and magic-carpet colours, even adults can be transported.

“Braveness Hats,” by Kate Hoefler, with illustrations by Jessixa Bagley, feels much less common however could possibly be helpful for kids fearing journey or the unknown. Nervous about taking a prepare that goes via woods (“bear locations”), a mysteriously unaccompanied minor named Mae decides to disguise herself as a bear by reducing up a paper bag and placing it on her head. In the meantime a younger bear, fearing a visit that goes via cities (“folks locations”), has completed the identical factor in reverse. They discover one another, and solace, on the prepare, the place they get pleasure from tea, snacks and views and gaze via a glass ceiling on the birds: “This looks like flying.”

It’s a head-scratcher, solved solely on the final pages, why these two scaredy-bears will not be within the precise air however on this sadly antiquated however cozy type of transport, which few however Alfred Hitchcock discovered ominous.

“Braveness Hats” needs a bit of too forcefully to information us into “deep” locations the place we’ll doff our hidey-hats to disclose our true selves — summary ideas for the literalizing peewee set. In relation to reassuring prepare bears, alas, it’s onerous to prime Paddington and his crimson sou’wester.

One other Mae, a personality from actual life, stars in “Mae Makes a Manner,” by Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich, with illustrations by Andrea Pippins. Printed to accompany a everlasting exhibit on the Nationwide Museum of African American Historical past and Tradition, this can be a biography of Mae Reeves, a famend Philadelphia milliner who died at 104 in 2016 and acquired distressingly scant obituary protection. Together with telling her story, “Mae Makes a Manner” can also be a pointed lesson in regards to the limits of integration in cities the place “Black ladies had been typically handled as if they had been invisible,” as Rhuday-Perkovich writes at her finest. “Hats had been a approach for these queens to be SEEN, shining a light-weight on the dignity they at all times had.” There’s a particular shout-out to the church women who saved Reeves’s enterprise going lengthy after vogue moved on.

Advised in a largely linear, scrapbookish fashion and appended by interviews with Donna Limerick, the milliner’s daughter, and Reneé S. Anderson, the pinnacle of collections on the NMAAHC (the place Reeves’s store has been painstakingly recreated), “Mae Makes a Manner” is a effective introduction to a decided trailblazer. It’s principally details, with occasional forays into fashionable lingo (“stay their finest lives,” “construct higher tomorrows”) and fillips of poetry (“glimmery hats, shimmery hats, snappy hats and completely satisfied hats”). The tantalizing close-ups of tulle, feathers and different furbelows cry out for an version with paper dolls.

Against this, creating an aesthetic that’s vaguely acquainted but completely out of time, “Kat Hats,” by Daniel Pinkwater, with illustrations by Aaron Renier, plunges us right into a geography of the absurd. The hats that Matt Katz sells in his store in snowy Pretzelburg will not be ornamental and uplifting however warming. In actual fact, they don’t seem to be hats in any respect. They’re cats.

By no means thoughts that, with uncommon exception, you possibly can’t prepare a cat to do something. “Kat Hats” sends up the acquainted directive to put on a hat as a result of “90 p.c of physique warmth is misplaced via the highest of the pinnacle,” proposing that if correctly topped, one “might even go to the North Pole in summer season pajamas and stay comfy.”

When the good-witch mommy of Katz’s buddy Previous Thirdbeard vanishes up a mountain with out her pointy hat, sucking on a blueberry and avocado ice pop (hats and mountains are perennial pairings in youngsters’s literature), she is stricken with mind freeze, a.okay.a. “frozen think-muscle.” It falls to Thermal Herman 6⅞ths, the showboat of Katz’s stock, to vogue himself right into a fedora, hitch a experience on a moose’s antlers that double as a hatrack and save her. With jolly maximalism and Shrinky Dinks shadings, this can be a ebook that invitations youngsters to take off their pondering caps, chill out and enjoy pure silliness.