Praise for The Book of Whys

Winner of the 2023 Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs's English Translation Prize!Selected for the 2025 White Ravens catalog of notable international children's literature!A Children's Book Council January 2023 Hot Off the Press selection!One of Betsy Bird's Top 4 Translations for Older Readers of 2024! "Rodari is a big name in the Italian children's book scene... This particular book is a series of questions from kids that he would answer in his newspaper column. But the true star of this show is Antony Shugaar who has the impossible task of having to not only translate into rhyme for many of these poems, but to make the jokes work (even the puns!), too... Well done, sir!!"
A Fuse 8 Production (A School Library Journal blog)

This witty, irreverent poetry collection grew out of Rodari's 1950s newspaper-column responses to Italian children who took him up on his offer: 'Everything has a reason why: just ask me and I'II reply.'
New York Times

Rodari (1920-80), his country's most celebrated 20th-century writer for children, took questions sent in by young readers over the course of several years to l'Unità, the newspaper of the Italian Communist Party. A selection of these entries, smoothly translated by Antony Shugaar and illustrated with zest and humor by JooHee Yoon, appears in The Book of Whys, a beguiling volume suited for sampling rather than for reading straight through… Rodari tackles all these questions with respect for the innocence and curiosity of his unseen interlocutors but without pandering or (mostly) showing his politics… His answers usually had two parts: one chatty and factual, the other jocose and poetic. Addressing the question of why river water is murky, Rodari writes that 'as rivers descend from mountains, … they load themselves up with mud and debris, which they release into the sea.' To accompany this very sensible explanation, he offers a ditty about all the famous rivers (the Thames, the Tiber, the Indus and others) meeting in the middle, as it were, and becoming subsumed and anonymous as their waters 'swirl waves of brine.'
Wall Street Journal

A 2025 White Ravens selection! "English language readers finally get the chance to enjoy Rodari's ingenious texts via Antony Shugaar's inspired translations. Instead of just providing detailed information to the children's quirky enquiries, Rodari's answers straddle the border between facts and imagination by including funny asides, proverbs, irony, poems, and tongue-in-cheek remarks... Award-winning JooHee Yoon's bright and bubbly coloured-pencil illustrations perfectly frame the witty texts and take readers on a whimsical visual journey."
The White Ravens 2025 Catalogue

About the Authors

Italian author Gianni Rodari wrote many beloved children's books and was awarded the prestigious Andersen Prize. But he was also an educator of paramount importance in Italy and an activist who understood the liberating power of the imagination. He is one of the twentieth century’s greatest authors for children, and Italy's greatest. Influenced by French surrealism and linguistics, Rodari stressed the importance of poetic language, metaphor, made-up language, and play. At a time when schooling was all about factual knowledge, Rodari wrote The Grammar of Fantasy, a radically imaginative book about storytelling and play. He was a forerunner of writing techniques such as the "fantastic binomial" and the utopian, world engendering "what if...." The relevance of Rodari’s works today lies in his poetics of imagination, his humanist yet challenging approach to reality, and his themes, such as war and peace, immigration, injustice, inequality, and liberty. Forty years after his death, Rodari’s writing is as powerful and innovative as ever. He died in Rome in 1980.
JooHee Yoon is an artist and educator whose practice spans illustration, design, and printmaking. Much of her work is influenced by her time experimenting with traditional printmaking techniques. Her drawings can often be seen in publications such as the New York Times, and she has exhibited widely both in the United States and abroad. In 2015 her first picture book, a contemporary take on the James Thurber classic The Tiger Who Would Be King, was named one of the New York Times 10 Best Illustrated Children’s Books. Currently she teaches in the illustration department at RISD, along with working on publishing projects.

Antony Shugaar is a writer and translator, working out of Italian and French. He once interviewed the creator of Topo Gigio.

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