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Deakin Newsletter January-February 2009Reviews written by Dr. Andrea Deakin
Picture Books
Cynthia Rylant conjures up our memories of snow in all its forms, how we experience it and how we react to it. "The best snow is the snow that comes softly in the night". This is the snow that greets us in the morning – the world transformed. Then there are the "fat, cheerful flakes" that crowd the sky when you are sent home from school early, sliding over slippery roads, throwing snowballs and making angels. Sometimes the snow is like a delicate brush, gently touching tree limbs and sparkling in "the light falling / from the lamppost". The author leads us, suggesting the fun of playing in the snow, only suggesting more than one small child by the use of "we". Lauren Springer picks up on this suggestion, for now, behind the child, is a grandmother, watching her from the window, then walking her home. Apart from the warm colours of home and the vivid outfits the children wear – bright against the snow, there is the subtle change of hues as evening, and then nightfall, colours the sparkling white of the flakes. Lauren Stringer delightfully captures the energy, the emotion, and the subtle beauty as light changes the colour of the white. The first end-plate shows a single flake making its way towards the story. The last is a mass of falling flakes with their myriad patterns, dropping through the night air to be captured in the morning. This is a delightful picture book. One in which author and illustrator together have woven a subtle memory of winter.
Louise might be a chicken, but she has the imagination and the heart of an adventurer. "She left the henhouse and went to sea, where the water was deep and dark." Alas, pirates are on the horizon and Louise is heading for their stewpot when a violent storm breaks out. In a scene where Harry Bliss perfectly captures her apprehension, she saves herself by hanging on to a broken timber. Astride the timber she paddles back to shore and returns to the farm. When asked, she calmly replies she has only been here and there. The henhouse is comfortable and safe – but it is not long before our intrepid adventurer is off again. We follow her adventures in a circus, in a bazaar, and while trying to return home by balloon and river boat. When she returns the henhouse does look comforting; but for how long?
Kate Di Camillo spins a delightfully tongue-in-cheek tale perfectly complimented by Harry Bliss's witty illustrations. There are little touches here which will amuse an adult reader: Such as Louise traveling up-river in The African Queen. Not once does the author loose touch with her heroine, Louise is Louise all the way through and the funnier and more loveable for it. This is a perfectly paced, witty yet thoughtful, story with author and illustrator creating a memorable heroine in the little hen.
Something dreadful is happening to poor Stanley. He is being bathed and blow-dried, trimmed and dressed up – everything but fed. This is bad, and there is worse to follow, for it appears that he and his friends, smelling of raspberry, sweet pea, and peppermint, are being entered in a dog show. Stanley does not shine in the competition, until drawn by hunger and the smell of a prize, he pulls over a table – a heroic act in the eyes of thirty-seven dogs who all land on top of each other, and the huge dog biscuit prize. Now, we feel, for this is being told from Stanley's point of view, now this is more like it. The dogs talk about the contest for days. They wonder how it would be if dogs ruled the world and had contests for people. Well, how would it be? How would it be if children were in charge too ... the young reader may well think. Linda Bailey and Bill Slavin pull off another hilarious, but thoughtful, Stanley adventure.Top
Same Same examines similarities beginning with round things such as an apple, the earth, and the shape of a tambourine. The tambourine leads us to things that make music, ending with a singing bird that leads, on the following page, to things that fly. The links continue in bold bright colour and illustration until we are brought to things that are red, culminating in our first picture – an apple.
The bright, bold pictures are bound to catch a small child's eye, while leading them on a dance of exploration and logic. This is another visually striking and engaging picture book from Marthe Jocelyn and Ted Slaughter.
When you are small how your imagination can play you tricks. Bridget is staying with Mrs. Blair when she finds biscuits in a shed – dog biscuits, and eats one. She confesses, and Mrs. Blair teasingly warns her "You'll go bowwow and turn into a dog". By the time Bridget's mum arrives Bridget is beginning to feel an itch behind her ears. From then on she is carried away by her imagination until, at bedtime, she is behaving like a wild dog. But Mum does not seem to see anything different about her appearance. Poor Bridget. Her concern becomes part of an exciting dream where, now a little dog and led by Mrs. Blair's dog, she is one of a party of wild dogs playing under the moon. Comforted by her mother she returns to Mrs. Blair's next day where some human-being biscuits put things to rights.
Helen Cooper deals in an amusing and sympathetic way with Bridget's fears. A combination of guilt and misunderstanding does get poor Bridget into a tizzy, but the reality of the illustration and the warm domestic settings allow small children to see that it is only her fears, not reality, and they can feel sympathy with her. Picture Books - Paperback
This book was first reviewed in hardcover in September 2005. It is an account of the migration of monarch butterflies from Canada to Mexico. One of the butterflies, on her way south, befriends an old tortoise called Hurry. When she continues her journey Hurry falls asleep and we follow the butterfly's trip to Mexico and a warm green forest. In the spring she returns to lay her eggs before she moves on. Harry watches the caterpillar hatch and grow until, a butterfly; he takes off to explore the world in turn. An attractive, easy-to-follow story, it clearly explains the migration while making the relationship between Hurry and the butterfly gentle and witty.
Hare is always in a hurry to do everything, but Tortoise likes to take his time. Hare lifts the edge of Tortoise's rhubarb leaf blanket, jumping up and down with impatience. He bounds off in every direction, bolts his carrot lunch while Tortoise slowly enjoys a tasty cabbage leaf, and plays every game with impatience. By now I was having memories, as I am sure many other parents will.
When it gets time for bed Tortoise has his eyes on a nice calming cup of chamomile tea, but Hare is ready for a story, so the patient Tortoise begins to read, rather quickly, from the book. He has his eye on that cup of Chamomile tea. At last Hare cries out," Hurry up and slow down! We need to look at the pictures!" Toddlers will see the fun, and so will their parents. This is a perfect "sharing" book, bound to become a family favourite. Illustrations and text join beautifully in telling the story between them, and in expressing the relationship between Tortoise and Hare. Witty detailed pictures in soft colour are full of little creatures to discover and commentary on the relationship between Tortoise and Hare. I particularly enjoyed the picture of Tortoise's thoughtful pause over a game of Tic Tac Toe played with beans and sticks while Hare, holding onto his toes, obviously rocks to and fro with impatience. Perfect. Fiction
Please note: The Graveyard Book is the Newbery Medal 2009 Winner (Please see “Featured Websites” in this issue) A hand in the darkness, a hand holding a knife and moving purposely through a home... but one victim is missing. A toddler has woken and bumped his way downstairs, toddling through the front door while Jack is at his evil task. Up the hill the baby makes his way, up to the cemetery gates. It is here that Jack will be thwarted, for a promise has been made to a recently dead form. Mr. and Mrs. Owens, a respectable eighteenth century couple, take on the ghostly care of the little boy. Bod grows up in the care of the graveyard's inhabitants. He dares not leave, for Five Jacks from an ancient organisation seeks to destroy him before he can grow to destroy them. Meanwhile Bod's upbringing is supervised by a group of ghosts, Caius Pompeius, the most ancient ghost, and a poet, a school teacher, and a physician. Meanwhile Mrs. Owens, Bod’s foster mother, comes solidly to his aid. Bod learns ways to protect himself, how to Fade, so that he can hide in plain sight, several different ways to call for aid, and he becomes the protégé of Silas, a strange and powerful dweller of the night. However, the moment must come when Bod is old enough to face the Jacks who are bent on his destruction. Bod's living is suspended between the living and the dead, but the graveyard is no grim home. Here are the stories of his ghostly friends, their teaching, their care, and a very loving home provided by the Owens. That strange things can happen, that he lives between worlds, is no concern to Bod. This is a caring, interesting and friendly world and he knows he is watched over by Silas. Neil Gaiman has given us a strange adventure, an account of growing up which counters reality, but which contains not only the chilling and horrific, but also wisdom and loving kindness where you would believe it least expected. The world is a strange place. He has presented all of this with wit and elegance and in an often very moving way.
In a time long before King Arthur, there existed the land of Lyonesse. Once it had been a beautiful land, but now it was sinking into the sea. It seems that the early people who treasured virtue had gone and now the people there lived by cruelly using the creatures that lived below the water in their wells to power their world. And so the land is sinking.
Idris Limpet, an ordinary lad, falls afoul of a jealous companion and is tossed into the water. Now a true human would drown, so the law says, but one who is half-caste, between sea creature and human, will swim; and so condemn himself to death. Idris does not actually swim, but neither does he drown, since he is hauled out of the water by a fisherman. Still, this is enough to condemn him, until he is rescued by an unusual stranger called Nose Ring who sets Limpet’s whole life on a new course and eventually shows him where his destiny lies. As human greed and error is making the land sink, so human courage and virtue will keep it above water – and there is a legend to consider. Idris has a destiny: To save Lyonesse and its people from error and destruction. Sam Llewellyn is from the Isles of Scilly – the traditional Lyonesse, and he weaves old legend and adventure story into a gripping tale, creating, along the way, a vivid environment and a frightening picture of a society badly astray and threatened by its own greed.
Wolf Rideris the sequel to Raven Quest, the story of Tok, a raven who became part of the mythology of the raven world when he re-established the hunting link between wolves and ravens. The imaginative, and gripping, first novel left Tok with his mate Tarkah, but tragedy has struck. Returning from chasing off a mob of strange ravens, he returns to his territory to find Tarkah murdered. Feeling himself now without honour for abandoning (as he sees it) his mate, he leaves his territory and, after an encounter with the Messenger raven, re-unites with the wolves to lead them from the barren destruction of the forests by Two Legs, to a promised new land. On the way they overcome attacks by an outlaw raven band, survive fire, shortage of game, floods and tragedies until they find the new land and discover who is behind the attacks of the rogue ravens.
From the beginning the reader is in a new, richly-imagined world with rolling landscape and narrow mountain passes, in a world where honour and duty are held high and where the fully-realized characters of wolf and raven become so alive to the reader that the sorrow and anguish they feel at the death of their own, or the sharp keen immediacy of the hunt or battle, the sense of humour and duty, compassion and support for each other, deeply concern the reader too.
Kate writes to her friend, Amy, and through her letters we learn of the tragedy that has hit her family. The family is devastated, for her brother, Josh, has been killed in a random shooting. The family have moved away to a horse ranch where her father and mother try desperately, but not too successfully, to make a new life for themselves and their remaining daughter. In a rundown apartment in the city, Sam tries to support his mother and keep an eye on his little sister, Cleo. Kate and Sam will never meet, but they are linked together, we begin to realise, by the same terrible event. Now they and their families struggle to remake their lives. While Kate's poignant letters draw a portrait of Josh and the traumatic effect of his death; Sam copes with his fears that, somehow, his brother Everett's violence is part of him too, and the fear underlies his guilt and anguish. Both Kate and Sam have to come to a moment, an act of courage and independence that will give them, and their families, a chance to move forward in life.
Hazel Hutchins' poignant story unfolds gently but persistently, raising the tension as the reader becomes more and more engaged with the young people, until the act of personal courage each commits becomes a kind of celebration as well as a release. That sense of celebration, that each of these young people will be able to go forward and carry their families with them, is an expression of the skill and understanding Hazel Hutchins has brought to her story.
Bookweird - or is that “wyrd”? Wyrd in the sense of how the future affects the past and the past the future and how it has developed into "weird", into a spell or charm, a controlling of fate.
Can he put everything back where it should be, or will Bookweird trap him in the pages of yet another book?
Intriguing and imaginative, Bookweird holds out all sorts of possibilities, engaging the reader in the interweaving of various plot lines that almost bemuse it’s bright young hero. Paul Glennon leaves us with an enigmatic event, perhaps a starting point for more... Fiction - Reprints
The Wild Swans was first published in 1981. The new edition has a different jacket, less dark then the original; otherwise it is the same thoughtful and engaging re-telling of Andersen's story by Amy Ehrlich and the same detailed delicate illustrations by Susan Jeffers. The story of the eleven princes, doomed by their evil stepmother to roam the world as swans, and their devoted loving sister who suffers pain, rejection and possible death in her struggle to free them from their enchantment, is still as powerful and moving as ever. Susan Jeffers' illustrations are always notable for their gentle colour and fine detail. The moss clings to tree trunks, each leaf is clearly depicted. The transparent wings of a fairy subtly change the shade of what lies behind them and the cloud-based, star-spangled domain she is in is linked to the very real forest beneath by tall firs that stretch from solid earth into the edge of the fairy realm. Every illustration is a feast of detail to observe – detail which comments in some way upon the tale. This is a lovely edition for young readers.
Penguin has re-issued three of Jean Little's titles in their Puffin Canada series. Her first book, winner of the Little Brown Children's Book Award in 1962, was Mine For Keeps, the story of Sally Copeland who has cerebral palsy. She has been away at a special school, but now the family is bringing her home to learn to cope around her own home, and attend a regular school. How she adjusts, despite the difficulties, makes friends and, eventually, while overcoming her own difficulties, manages to reach out and help another, is a moving and thoughtful story. Her physical difficulties and how she copes with them in a class of healthy children can only open the eyes and gain the sympathy of the young reader. Spring Begins in March (1966) continues the story of Sally's family. A few years have passed and Meg, the youngest child, cannot seem to cope; bickering with family at home and struggling at school. She is having so much difficulty that it is unlikely she will pass the grade. Then, just when she has the promise of a room of her own, Grandma Kent comes to live with them, and that turns out to be a most fortunate event. One to Grow On (1969) introduces us to Jane Chisholm, one of those children who must make a good story better. She does not mean to lie; she just cannot control her imagination or her tongue. This leads to problems at home and at school. Then Jane meets Lisa, a pretty girl whose parents are celebrities; but it happens that Lisa is an embellisher too. She builds up her own importance and her own experiences to make up for being neglected at home. Janie does not realise all this at first. She just knows how much Lisa's ways hurt her. She is delighted when her godmother offers to take her onto an island with her for the summer – only the holiday does not work out as she had imagined. Jean Little has the ability to enter into the lives of her young heroines, giving them a reality as they deal with the sort of problems that they face – insecurity above all – and make us think of them as young people worthy of our sympathy and understanding. Non-Fiction
This is the latest title in the excellent Starting Art Series; books which offer young children basic instruction in techniques in a lively, clearly expressed way. Here they produce a series of collages of sea creatures, each explaining an oceanic term. A flying fish is depicted in cut paper collage, an octopus in torn paper collage, a whale in decoupage. A crab proves that you can use all sorts of found objects to embellish the image, a series of starfish introduce the idea of pattern and a turtle, of weaving. All of these techniques are then combined.
The illustrations are clear, following the technique and showing the brightly-coloured creature that results. Like other books in this series, the work can be tackled alone, or for younger children, with the aid of an adult. The bright pictures and witty little drawings make this a very attractive introduction to this art form for young children.
A gripping concept this, I defy any young reader to stop reading. This illustrated and abbreviated version of Bill Bryson's book is bound to capture the imagination of any youngster - potential scientist or potential student of the arts, for what follows is fundamental to where we come from and who we are. The story of our discovery of our world and of ourselves has rarely been put before young people in such an inviting and engaging way as early ideas and recent theories of how earth functions, and how life developed, are presented, interwoven with examples of our careless attitude to the earth and to other species we share it with.
"...that if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn't chose human beings for the job."
But we are what there is, and this book makes this very clear to the young people who will read it. The responsibility is ours. From the Adult List - Non-Fiction
This is the first definitive book on Canadian women artists from 1800 until the mid twentieth century. The author states that the book is intended to be mainly exploratory, raising the awareness "of the changing nature of the way we regard women artists". For the sake of this study, Prakash divides the book into two parts: trailblazers and masters of their craft, arguing that the trailblazers are those who changed Canadian art forever. Prakash includes an annotated index of 564 early Canadian women artists, and in-depth biographies of thirty-six artists with additional colour reproductions and insights into their work. Because he covers the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century artists like Daphne Odjig and Mary Pratt are not mentioned. Hopefully he will cover the more recent period in a later volume. What he does uncover for us are a host of barely known names and reproductions which suggest these artists could be rediscovered quickly. Women painters, in the past, have often limited themselves to portraiture and domestic scenes, executed with sensitivity and fine technique,"...women artists have been particularly sympathetic to themes that reaffirm and dramatize the importance of life...", but in this collection we also see them breaking loose to tackle more dramatic themes and settings. We have Charlotte Schreiber's children playing winter games, or a portrait of a young woman arranging flowers, but we also have Frances Kenny Courtice' s “The Game” and Emily Carr's “Thunderbird”. Part I contains seventy-seven works of art by thirty-six artists. Part II has in-depth biographies accompanied by full page colour reproductions. Independent Spirit is a valuable reference and a worthy introduction to many Canadian women artists who will be unknown to many of us. It deserves a place in every high school library and a space on every Art lover's shelves.
After more than one hundred journeys to the region, David McGonigal has vast experience and knowledge of Antarctica. McGonigal has gathered over twenty consultants for this book who are familiar with various aspects of Antarctica from wildlife and atmospheric physics to navigation and history. The result is a very readable text packed with information and generously illustrated with photographs, maps and diagrams. The book begins with a physical description of ice shelves and icebergs, frozen seas and magnificent auroras. A discussion of climate change and the rate of melting ice leads on to changes in the ecosystems and the effect of this on wildlife. Various areas of Antarctica are covered in specific detail, such as Ross Island and the Davis Sea, as well as comments on fossil findings in various areas and remnants of meteorites, now being uncovered. There are detailed descriptions of flora and fauna, from the familiar seals and penguins to rare birds and sea creatures, as well as a detailed section on past explorations. Much of the photography is breath-taking and the whole book brings a poorly understood and appreciated region to vivid existence. I would strongly suggest that this book has a place in the reference section of high school libraries, and it would certainly give much pleasure to any enthusiast of Antarctic exploration and discovery.
Dilys Evans is a past art director of Cricket magazine, an advisor to Caldecott Award committees, and president of Dilys Evans Fine Illustration. Show and Tell deals with the work of a dozen well-known United States illustrators of children's books - Hilary Knight, Trina Schart Hyman, Bryan Collier, Paul O. Zelinsky, David Weisner, Betsy Lewin, Harry Bliss, David Shannon , Petra Mathers, Brian Selznick, Denise Fleming and Lane Smith. She has chosen this group, she says, because they would offer readers " as broad a frame of reference as possible".
Picture book art is rarely considered as fine art. Leaving that argument to one side, it is certainly still the very first place that most children are introduced to colour, shape and interpretation (of emotion and atmosphere). The most able of illustrators quickly gather their own young audience who eagerly seek out each new title. They also gather their own adult enthusiasts who collect picture books too. In isolated areas they are, through the aegis of school and public libraries, frequently the main source of art exposure and interpretation for young children, each offering their own specific style and visual truth.
To Dilys Evans' book - she describes each artist's career from their youth, looking at influences and teachers. At Yale, for example, Zelinsky took a course, the History of the Picture Book, taught by Maurice Sendak. "One of the most important things that jumped out at me during the class was the idea of rhythm in picture books..." This concept is visible not only in the continuous flow of storytelling in his illustrations, but in the visual effects of his background work.
Hilary Knight loved the simplicity and pen and ink technique of Ernest Shepard - which underlines some of the drawings for Eloise. He also was intrigued by Ronald Searle whose madcap, energetic illustrations for the St. Trinian's girls caught his eye. Certainly some of that madcap energy can be seen in Eloise. From David Wiesner's unpredictable tales to the late Trisha Schart Hyman's powerfully visual storytelling, each of the artists is considered with a keen eye and clarity of analysis. This is a book for anyone concerned with and fascinated by the Show and Tell of outstanding illustration for children. AwardsNewbery Medal 2009
Caldecott Medal 2009
Michael Printz Award
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