The Horn Book » Joanna Rudge Long

Review of My Brother’s Book

Joanna Rudge Long — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 15:00:28 +0000

My Brother’s Book
by Maurice Sendak;  illus. by the author
di Capua/HarperCollins 32 pp.
2/13 978-0-06-223489-6 $18.95 g
If, as Wordsworth wrote, “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity,” Sendak’s vision of a Dante-esque search for his beloved brother Jack (1924–1995) is poetry in both word and art—though tranquility is only achieved with reunion in the sleep of death. In an eloquent introduction, Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt links this posthumous book to A Winter’s Tale, “absorbed, redistributed, and transformed into something rich and strange” and also notes the familiar Sendakian relationship between love and menace. Indeed. “Guy’s” dreamlike quest is riddled with such opposites: light and dark, heaven and the underworld, fire and ice, winter and spring. The visual imagery in the postcard-sized art is haunting, with nude adult figures recalling William Blake’s ardent seekers after truth; the sleeping babes in the wood; and multiple moons (now faceless, unlike in We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, rev. 1/94) plus stars and suns. Some of Sendak’s most poignant themes take on even more resonance and universality. Holocaust references, while still present, are not explicit. Eating, or being eaten by, a powerful figure now involves a bear—not Shakespeare’s, exactly, but a polar bear that is intrinsic to the brothers’ transfiguration. As the ultimate not-for-little-children Sendak, this profoundly personal book about loss and healing should find its audience among thoughtful adults (and perhaps some teenagers).

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Review of The McElderry Book of Mother Goose

Joanna Rudge Long — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 19:00:25 +0000

The McElderry Book  of Mother Goose: Revered and Rare Rhymes
compiled by Petra Mathers;  illus. by the compiler
Primary, Intermediate    McElderry    96 pp.
8/12    978-0-689-85605-1    $21.99
e-book ed. 978-1-4424-5314-2    $12.99
Not since Leonard Marcus’s Mother Goose’s Little Misfortunes (rev. 11/90) has there been such a delightfully idiosyncratic selection. Drawn mostly from the canonical Opies (see “Sources”), Mathers’s fifty-seven entries include many lesser-known or longer rhymes (some “sad and scary”), all nicely leavened with such familiar nonsense as “Hey Diddle Diddle.” Here are puzzles (“I Saw a Fishpond All on Fire”); tongue twisters and verbal nonsense (“The Great Panjandrum”); stories tragic (“poor babes in the wood”) and comic (a peddler sells a woman “the piece he’d purloined” from her own petticoat). Several are lyrical (“seventeen times as high as the moon”) or mysterious (“tell my mother I shall never come back”). Vocabulary is unstinted (counting down “Ten Little Penguins”: “One got in chancery”). The delicate wit of Mathers’s watercolors and the generous spaces where her characters appear enable creative interpretation—Cock Robin’s funeral is a cooperative venture amongst the birds; Hector Protector, “dressed all in green,” is green himself: he’s a frog. Dr. Fell’s disgruntled patient, a dog, has a bandaged foot and a plastic Elizabethan collar. Mathers’s expressive figures, in many moods, are effectively counterpointed by touches of dramatic, or pensive, landscape. Pair this with the Opie/Sendak I Saw Esau (rev. 9/92) for a feast of traditional rhymes.

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Phillip Hoose on Moonbird

Joanna Rudge Long — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 15:32:12 +0000

From the July/August 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine:
Reviewer Joanna Rudge Long asks Moonbird: A Year on the Wind with the Great Survivor B95 author Phillip Hoose about the rufa red knot’s current whereabouts. Read the full starred review of Moonbird here.

Joanna Rudge Long: Has there been another sighting of B95 since 11/25/11?

Phillip Hoose: No, we have not seen him since November 25. However, we have high hopes that we will see him again this May. Nearly all rufa red knots converge upon the beaches of Delaware Bay during the last two weeks of May to dine upon a banquet of horseshoe crab eggs. B95 was reported at one particular harbor on the Delaware side of the Bay six times last spring during a four-day period late in May. We’ll have our fingers crossed and our spotting scopes out!

UPDATE: Moonbird was recently spotted in New Jersey; see Hoose’s blog for details.

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Review of Moonbird: A Year on the Wind with the Great Survivor B95

Joanna Rudge Long — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 14:14:25 +0000

Moonbird: A Year on the Wind with  the Great Survivor B95
by Phillip Hoose
Intermediate, Middle School, High School
Farrar  148 pp. 7/12 978-0-374-30468-3 $21.99
He’s called “Moonbird” because, over a lifespan of twenty years, he’s flown some 325,000 miles, the distance to the moon and almost halfway back. This robin-sized red knot (subspecies rufa), a shorebird, is in southern Argentina from October to February and in the Arctic, breeding, for a few summer weeks; between times, his great migrating flock is like a “constantly shifting organism—now a ball, now a rippling blanket” as the birds fly nearly from pole to pole twice a year. Stops are few but strategic; after thousands of miles it’s essential to bulk up with what’s available at the same few sites each year: mosquito larvae, mussels, horseshoe crab eggs. Thanks to banding and photography by scientists, who call him B95, sightings are documented since 1995 (when adult plumage indicated B95’s age to be at least three years). Even for his species, B95 is extraordinary — “one of the world’s premier athletes” — but Hoose’s fascinating account concerns much more than this one bird. In lucid, graceful prose, Hoose details the red knots’ characteristics and strategies, sampling far-flung challenges to their survival (e.g., fishermen harvesting horseshoe crabs in crucial stopover Delaware Bay). He describes research methods (cannon nets, banding), profiles scientists in international cooperation as well as activist kids, and takes a sobering look at longterm prospects for survival not just of the rufa but of most species on earth. Glorious full-page color photographs alternate with excellent smaller photos (including one of B95 taken on November 25, 2011) and many good, helpful maps in a highly informative progression of images. Exemplary source notes, including many interviews, plus acknowledgments and picture credits; a bibliography; and an index.

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Review of Lies, Knives, and Girls in Red Dresses

Joanna Rudge Long — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 14:17:57 +0000

Lies, Knives, and Girls in Red Dresses
by Ron Koertge; illus. by Andrea Dezsö
High School Candlewick 88 pp.
7/12 978-0-7636-4406-2 $19.99
A much-honored poet and novelist retells, in free verse and from various points of view, twenty-three familiar tales (mostly Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault). With a contemporary sensibility and voice, Koertge pitches directly to teenagers. Beauty’s Beast, though allowing that “her love…transformed me,” is still nostalgic for the time when his teeth were fangs and Beauty “almost wanted / me to break her neck and open her / up like a purse.” For the Ugly Duckling, “Grief is a street he skates down”; the swans, surrogate parents, beg, “Please don’t go away like / that again. We were worried sick.” There are several eager risk takers here, like the queen who outwits Rumpelstiltskin, then exits in a red cape, seeking a wolf. A few stories later, Red Riding Hood’s condescending account to her mother is a perfect parody: “I’m into danger, / okay? What? You said to tell you the truth and be, like, frank.” It’s also a swell mix of the comical, concrete, and macabre: “Anyway, it’s weird / inside a wolf, all hot and moist but no worse than flying / coach to Newark.” Dezsö’s choice of cut-paper illustrations is brilliant, a nod to Hans C. Andersen’s skill in that medium despite the radically different tone. Her stark silhouettes are peculiarly appropriate to such gruesome scenes as “The Robber Bridegroom” dismembering a bride, though the lurid gore is in a comfortably distancing black and white. Need to grab a restive class’s attention? Seek no further. And take note: “Wolf ” has the last word: “This is our forest…Perfect again when all your kind is dead.”

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Caldecott 2012: “everything…which is yes”

Joanna Rudge Long — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 19:25:48 +0000

Just as the proof of the pudding is in the eating, real appreciation of a picture book depends on more than a first taste, or a first look; truer evaluation becomes possible only after savoring every nuance. At first glance, illustrations may delight us with their beauty — their drafting, palette, forms, composition; with how they embody emotion, or childhood itself. One artist charms with humor, well-paced action, or visual harmony. Another captures the imagination with a beloved character or a story distilled to its irreducible essence.

But to seek a year’s “most distinguished” illustrations — to choose a Caldecott winner — is to look again: to tune in to rhythms, consider trajectories, discover details and connections; and to hope that such particulars will offer the kind of epiphany E. E. Cummings called “everything / which is natural which is infinite which is yes.” A detailed study of some of 2011’s best picture books, medaled and not, made me both more critical and more appreciative. It revealed limitations, missed on first reading, of some appealing titles; contrariwise, in the best ones, I now perceived finer crafting, richer meaning.

Here, then, are some books that seemed to merit serious consideration for the award, or that helped illuminate issues involved in a final choice. Several of these arrest the eye with their extraordinary simplicity. One such, I Want My Hat Back, was frequently mentioned as a Caldecott contender. In Jon Klassen’s neatly balanced compositions, a bear — still as a statue through much of the book — meets other near-immobile creatures in minimal settings. Only the animals’ alert, stylized eyes suggest the drama that will finally erupt on a revelatory solid-red page and set up the story’s sly conclusion. Klassen’s digitally created illustrations are austere. It’s those eyes that focus attention on what’s seen (and unseen) until memory triggers the bear’s retrospective vision — a clever scenario, elegantly rendered.

Patricia Intriago’s Dot, composed as it is of simple shapes and lines, is even more spare. Yet this able graphic designer telegraphs a lot with her graphic forms, using small additions and alterations in size, conformation, or color to convey motion and emotion, sound, taste, and more, including the night sky. Another virtuoso performance is Michael Hall’s exploration of the transformative possibilities of collages improvised, like tangrams, from squares. Like Dot, Hall’s Perfect Square is an exercise in graphic possibility, but Hall brings more ingenuity and a sense of story to the process. He tears, snips, or otherwise divides each square, then reassembles it in a simple scene, with a new color each weekday. On Sunday, the square — cleverly escaping its shape’s constraints — becomes a window through which the earlier scenes are recapped in a rainbow finale.

Lois Ehlert’s art, too, is rooted in graphic design. In RRRalph, she composes a dog from amusingly recognizable objects like buttons, a pop-top, and a zipper. Ralph, a character of buoyant, spread-dominating energy,enacts such pun-ready sounds as wolf, rough, and bark. Printed in handsome boldface, Ralph’s “words” and the large-type commentary by his unseen human are as intrinsic to the striking design as Ralph himself. These minimalist titles may not have the singular quality that evokes that rare sense of Cummings’s “Yes”; still, they’re entirely worthy, fine just as they are.

Among possible nonfiction Caldecott contenders this year were two memoirs. In Orani: My Father’s Village, Claire A. Nivola describes her father’s birthplace as she recalls it from childhood visits. In her realistic, decorative art, the red-roofed Sardinian village nestles in a sun-washed landscape, its people — including crowds of children — engaged in traditional work and play, indoors and out. The busy scenes, expertly organized for clarity of meaning and visual harmony, employ a minimum of detail, yet the simply characterized figures brim with good humor and purposeful activity.

Contrasting with Nivola’s sunny, harmonious paintings, Ed Young’s tribute to his father, and to the fortress-like house he built in wartime Shanghai, is a kaleidoscope of media and memories. The House Baba Built combines collage (flat and textured); photos, maps, and architectural drawings; sketches; nuanced portraits; and more — all jostling together among several gatefolds and against bright backgrounds, like the extended family and numerous others who found companionable refuge together in that island of safety. Resembling an album of long ago, the book’s imagery mirrors Young’s memories — precise, vivid, and sometimes shadowed with retrospective understanding — like the masses of crows that presage the bombers Baba’s house was destined to survive.

Kadir Nelson’s portraits for Heart and Soul are splendid. Is this “Story of America and African Americans” a picture book? Since its meaning would be severely truncated without those inspiring paintings, it could be argued that the book falls within the award guidelines. Are these heroic figures idealized? There is a consistency to their nobility; still, each person is individual, recognizable. If I’d been on the committee, I’d have wanted to discuss these distinguished illustrations.

One work of nonfiction did receive a 2012 Caldecott Honor: Me…Jane, by Patrick McDonnell, creator of the comic strip Mutts. At first glance, this introduction to Jane Goodall recalls the comic strip’s endearing style: McDonnell’s visual narrative focuses on lively, observant young Jane exploring her childhood territory and imagining faraway Africa. But like Ed Young, McDonnell incorporates other media. Contrasting with the briskly (and affectionately) drafted characters, his more realistic watercolor settings are invitingly verdant outdoors, cozy within. Old engravings in pale hues provide backgrounds for the verso text, balancing the more saturated recto colors. There are photos, too, and precocious art by thriving, inquisitive young Jane herself, all expertly integrated to suggest the many facets of the scientist’s life.

Nancy Ekholm Burkert also imagines Africa, but in her quintessentially elegant style that’s entirely different from McDonnell’s cartoons. Mouse and Lion appear in specific, meticulously researched detail, formally framed in classic rule. Landscape features enhance some full spreads, but Burkert usually suggests settings with just a few significant details amid plentiful white space, the better to focus on action she evokes with repeated images of the mouse, or by showing only the lion’s gaping mouth. This is entrancing, gently humorous storytelling, a perfect match for Rand Burkert’s lively adaptation.

Maurice Sendak can summon every bit as much elegance as Burkert (see Dear Mili); he’s also a master of the profoundly witty sketch (I Saw Esau). In Bumble-Ardy, as so often before, he uses both. At this birthday masquerade, a fulsome array of pigs caricature their Dickensian (and often scary) human counterparts. Still, Bumble-Ardy’s party makes an amusing wild rumpus; and if Aunt Adeline’s righteous anger is over the top, so is her affectionate forgiveness (including a scrumptious birthday treat — sweeter than a still-hot supper). The treasure, here, is Sendak’s art — its impeccable drafting, diversity of strange characters, and subtle transitions between mayhem and cozy order.

John Rocco’s 2012 Caldecott Honor, Blackout, celebrates pretty much the opposite of Bumble-Ardy’s illicit gathering. Deprived of their solitary plugged-in pursuits, people discover community in the nighttime street and at a rooftop party; one family’s new-found camaraderie even survives the power’s coming back on. Rocco’s angular characters are comfortably ordinary. What shines here, besides the wonderful play of light and shadow, is composition: the Brooklyn Bridge looming over a rectilinear street, its lights continuing the line of a diagonal fire escape; varied points of view and rhythmic frames (including windows); figures silhouetted against a starry sky. Having the lights come on is a letdown, reflected in a suddenly drab palette. Then, at the close, the magic Rocco has brought to life with each detail, stance, hue, and shade is recaptured in candlelight.

Beth Krommes’s radiant art for Swirl by Swirl: Spirals in Nature amplifies and extends Joyce Sidman’s poetic observations with delightful ingenuity. From a chipmunk “snuggling” in its burrow to maturing nautilus shells, from a wave’s curl to vines’ tendrils, spirals are, fascinatingly, everywhere. Krommes composes each spread with clarity, grace, and even more species than Sidman mentions, catching their essence in crisp black scratchboard and an intense natural palette — golden browns, glowing rust, gentle blues and greens. Here’s art that serves science while enriching the reader’s visual imagination. From fern frond to spiral galaxy, this perfectly integrated picture book epitomizes that “which is natural which is infinite which is yes.”

As does, for the youngest, Kevin Henkes’s deceptively simple Little White Rabbit. Limned in broad, elemental strokes, surrounded by soft springtime colors, Rabbit ventures forth, explores, is frightened by a cat, and hops safely home to mother. But there’s such lovely variety here! What would it be like to be green? Tall? Still as a stone? Between neatly framed hops, Rabbit’s wonderment bursts into lush, full-bleed spreads that expand the very concept of imagination—and then balance that freedom with a satisfying dose of reality, to arrive at an emotional truth that Henkes underlines with each delicate sweep of his brush, each tender hue.

The winsome narrator in Lane Smith’s 2012 Caldecott Honor, Grandpa Green, also takes an imaginative journey, one whose layers of meaning, again, are suggested by using more than one medium. Smith renders present-day characters in brush and ink; for the “foliage” (topiary) that depicts Grandpa’s history, he uses watercolor, oils, and digital paint. It’s a felicitous pairing. Delicate drafting and the little boy’s self-assured stance and stride imbue him with reality, while his tale in topiary is more fantastical, quite like a child’s understanding of an old man’s reminiscences. As the boy observes, “The garden remembers”; and if some of those dappled green figures are impossibly agile for actual boxwood, the amiable characters and their present-day projects are as real as Grandpa’s lost-and-found glasses. Grandpa Green is a magical vision of how an old man’s memories, simplified by time, can generate a child’s imaginative understanding. And what a potent image is the serene topiary! Like a good story retold, it’s timeless, constantly growing, changing with each judicious trimming. It’s like memories shared with a beloved child — some mysterious dark foliage but no shadows, with boundless white space for imagination to roam. Natural. Infinite. Yes!

“Yo! Yes!” Chris Raschka’s characters agree, sealing their new friendship in his 1994 Caldecott Honor book of the same name. His wordless Caldecott Medal winner this year is a more elaborate take on the theme of friendship. Words aren’t needed in A Ball for Daisy: the action and emotion are all in the body language and subtly shifting color. Raschka’s relaxed lines, too, are wondrously expressive. Daisy the dog is unconfined by the broad, freely brushed gray that suggests her shape and movements, while her eloquent face, ears, and tail telegraph her emotions in bold black. Daisy is all emotion: joy in possessing and chasing her ball (stand-in for a blanket, or a friend); despair when it pops; solace, cuddling on the sofa; joy again at getting a new ball and making a dog friend, too. Romping right along with Daisy across the liberating white space, Raschka’s brush develops each emotional state with expertly paced vignettes. Each double-page spread grouping is a compositional tour de force and a delight. Minimal backgrounds signal mood: joy is a glow of yellow with touches of sky blue and spring green; angst, a cloud of deepening violets and grays. Daisy’s owner is outside the pup’s focus (and ours: she’s seen from Daisy’s level, waist down) until after Daisy’s loss, when we finally see the whole child, suggesting that Daisy’s relationship with her human, too, has expanded, and that the pup’s happiness is enriched as well as regained.

At first glance this looks so simple, this mini saga of loss and reparation. Yet Raschka’s characterization is marvelously deft. With a wealth of suggestive and telling touches of his nimble brush, Daisy goes from self-absorbed ebullience to utter resignation to congenial frolic. She’s the essence of young dog — and of a two-year-old child becoming a wiser three. Though her story is simple, it’s transcendent: “everything / which is natural which is infinite which is yes.”

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Review of Show Me a Story: Why Picture Books Matter

Joanna Rudge Long — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 15:44:12 +0000

Show Me a Story!:
Why Picture Books Matter:  Conversations with 21 of the World’s Most Celebrated Illustrators
compiled and edited  by Leonard S. Marcus
Middle School, High School, Of Interest to Adults Candlewick 310 pp.
4/12 978-0-7636-3506-0 $22.99
“For a story’s text to work, it needs to be incomprehensible. Otherwise you wouldn’t need the pictures,” avers Mo Willems, neatly explicating the title for these “Conversations with 21 of the World’s Most Celebrated Illustrators.” This subtitle may sound familiar: eleven of these interviews appeared in Marcus’s Ways of Telling: Conversations on the Art of the Picture Book (rev. 9/02). What’s added is grand to have, however: ten new interviews; a revised introduction; updates for such luminaries as Maurice Sendak and Eric Carle; and a succinct foreword by David Wiesner explaining why picture books really do matter. Along with the artists’ eloquent musings on their sources of inspiration, Marcus’s disarming queries elicit a fine array of revealing experiences, methods of working, and motivations for illustrating for children. The book teems with quotable insights: “If someone is asleep…you don’t necessarily want to see [the] bed, but you might want to look at the dreams” (Quentin Blake); “M. B. Goffstein’s Me and My Captain…conveys such a beautiful sense of longing” (Kevin Henkes); “My doodle habit became my art” (Yumi Heo); “A good ending is inevitable, but it’s also a surprise” (James Marshall, in a brilliant 1989 interview peppered with memorable lines). Marcus captures the artists as well as their art: Peter Sís, shaped by powerful memories of his father; Vera Williams, who even as a child “was irrepressible, extremely talkative, and quite cute…[and] also had quite a developed sense of the tragic.” A thirty-two–page color insert includes “dummy spreads, sketches, and other preliminaries,” an excellent decision given that the books themselves are so widely known. New entries here also include John Burningham, Lois Ehlert, and Lisbeth Zwerger. Bibliography of picture books cited; illustration credits; source notes; index. Adults may be the primary audience for this fine resource, but it will inspire, inform, and delight those of any age who are engaged in—or by—the arts.

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