Campbell Geeslin, illustrated by Ryan Sanchez,
Clara and Señor Frog
Schwartz & Wade Books, 2007.

Ages 4-8

In Clara and Señor Frog, Campbell Geeslin (Elena’s Serenade, How Nanita Learned to Make Flan) invites readers to discover the magic of art along with his young protagonist. The daughter of a magician’s assistant, young Clara knows all the tricks and finds magic boring.  But when visiting her aunt, the housekeeper for “rich gringos who have gone al Norte to visit relatives,” Clara encounters a painting by a famous artist and believes she has found real magic at last.

As chance would have it, the artist himself (an enormous man, clearly styled after Diego Rivera) shows up at the house soon afterward and takes an immediate liking to Clara’s beautiful mother.  Before Clara knows what’s happening, she and her mother are posing for the artist (whom she has dubbed Señor Frog), and Clara is clearly caught up in the magic of watching paintings come to life.  In no time, it seems, Clara’s mother and Señor Frog are married, and the young girls is getting art lessons from the master and finding her own place as a budding artist.

This delightful tale is told, appropriately, in pictures as much as in words. Sanchez’s bold, bright palette and exaggerated use of proportion make this story as fun and enchanting as Clara’s own encounters with both the famous painter and the painter inside herself.

It is slightly disappointing that Clara and Señor Frog is not bilingual as Geeslin’s other children's titles have been. With this book, readers may not learn much new Spanish,  but they will learn a few things about art, about Mexico and about more than one kind of magic!