Lynne Rae Perkins reviews

Lynne Rae Perkins  Home Lovely; illus. by the author
   Greenwillow/Morrow
   Reviewed 11/95
At the end of May, Tiffany and her mother, Janelle, move in to a bare, raw-looking trailer in the middle of nowhere. Tiffany’s world is limited to playing with her Barbie dolls and watching television until, one day, she spots some seedlings growing out near the garbage can and gets permission to move them to the front yard. She hopes they are trees, or, at the very least, flowers. As the summer goes on, the plants flourish and grow, and Bob, their mail carrier, stops to compliment Tiffany on her good-looking tomatoes, melons, and potatoes. Tiffany is terribly disappointed that what she has been tending so lovingly are just vegetables, but she cheers up when she and Janelle make a colorful scarecrow for their garden, and even more when Bob stops by with some new additions: pansies, petunias, and marigolds. The first ripe tomato of the season is a big event — “’B.L.T.s all around,’ yelled Janelle.” Things really start looking up as fall approaches. Janelle’s job becomes full-time, and mother and daughter come home from celebrating to find a present from Bob — a little tree ready for planting. Each element of this original picture book is a stand-out. The humor is deft and dry, reminiscent somewhat of Helen Griffith’s Janetta books. The characterizations are rich, revealing Tiffany and Janelle’s close, easy relationship and tracing Bob’s slow, natural entry into their lives. The pen-and-ink and watercolor illustrations capture the initial drabness of the trailer and its transformation by the end of the summer into a place rich with color — in addition to the vegetables and flowers, the yard is adorned with yellow dandelions and Tiffany’s brightly striped and polka-dotted socks, which she has used to tie up the tomatoes. The book is especially welcome for its affirmation of working-class life and its recognition that a home does not have to be a place to feel like one. At one point Tiffany reads, in an upscale magazine called Home Lovely, an article about a princess’s estate that says, “a garden pleases the eye and is a companion to the soul.” “That’s true, thought Tiffany.” Martha V. Parravano

Lynne Rae Perkins  Clouds for Dinner; illus. by the author
    Greenwillow/Morrow
   Reviewed 9/97
Perkins (Home Lovely) once again celebrates the nontraditional. Janet’s parents spend more time admiring clouds than cooking meals, and her hilltop house is similarly impractical — eighty-seven steps up. “’Keeps us young!’ said Janet’s mother and father. ‘I already am young,’ said Janet.” Janet longs for more regularity, and so is delighted when she is invited to spend the weekend at her suburban soccer-mom aunt’s house. Janet enjoys everything — the site-down dinners, the recliners in the TV room, the drive-through car wash — until, early the second morning, Janet wakes to see “leaves” on the trees outside her window turn into birds and lift up into the lightening sky. She tries to convey the magic to her aunt, but that prosaic soul doesn’t understand. “What woke you ups so early? I hope it wasn’t the dogs. Do you want some more toast?” On the way home, Janet shares her story with her receptive mother (“Wow…..What a lucky thing to see. I wish I’d been there”) but manages to stand up for her own more practical side as well, so that night, her whole family sits down together for a meal that “anyone could tell…was dinner.” Perkins has the knack of capturing a whole personality with brief phrases and snatches of dialogue. Her strong text is accompanied by pen-and-ink and watercolor illustrations — vignettes, full-pages pictures, and lovely double-page spreads (including the Lloyd-Bloom-like cloud end-papers) that do justice to the beauty fo the northern Michigan landscape. Martha V. Parravano

Lynne Rae Perkins  The Broken Cat; illus. by the author
    Greenwillow
    Reviewed 5/02
The cat (and, as we’ll see, an arm) may be broken, but the picture book itself is indisputably a whole, imaginatively conceived and emotionally satisfying. As Andy and his mother, grandmother, and aunt sit tensely in the vet’s waiting room with their injured cat, Frank, Andy asks his mom to tell him a story: the one about “that time when you were running because you were late for school and you tripped on a little chunk of sidewalk that was sticking up because of a tree root and you fell and broke your arm.” Perkins (Home Lovely, rev. 11/95; Clouds for Dinner, rev. 9/97) gets the telling of an oft-told family story just right, including the bumpy bits (“‘Let’s see,’ said Andy’s mom. ‘I think I was in second grade.’ ‘No,’ said Andy’s grandma, ‘you were in the third grade.’ ‘I must have been in the fifth grade, then,’ said his aunt Cookie. ‘Well, anyway,’ said his mom, ‘it was a long time ago’”) as well as the parts everyone knows by heart (“‘And then did you cry and cry, and you couldn’t stop crying?’ Andy asked his mom. ‘I cried and cried, and I couldn’t stop crying’”). Perkins lets the contradicting and augmenting that takes place in her narrative spill over into her illustrations: thought balloons reveal each participant’s memories; illustrations correct each other, just as the characters do; and there’s even an actual photo (of the “brute” of a tomcat who roughed Frank up). The result is a creative and highly engaging interaction of text and illustration. Eventually, the story of Mom’s broken arm merges with the story of Frank’s wounded head, and the book closes with arm mended, Frank mended, and Andy writing down the story—a new family story—his pencil just forming the words “the end.” The whole thing is an unpretentious paean to the ability of stories to comfort and connect: see Perkins’s warm and clever title page illustration, which says it all. Martha V. Parravano

Lynne Rae Perkins  Snow Music; illus. by the author
    Greenwillow 9/03
    Reviewed 11/03
Perkins explores the sensations, and especially the sounds, associated with a gentle fall of snow. “Everyone whisper,” she begins, setting the mood with a page patterned in quiet blues and dotted with a soft, repeated syllable—“peth peth peth” — like the flakes of snow that blanket the world while children and creatures alike nestle in their beds. There follows a day of exploration: a dog escapes; other animals leave tracks (“What is the sound of one bird hopping?”); the boy seeking the dog is joined by a friend. A car’s parallel tracks modulate into musical staves that convey the sounds of a winter’s day, visual representations of, say, the dog trotting along, its breath (huff huff) a treble counterpoint to the bass of its jingling dog tags. Elsewhere, the arrangement of type mirrors footprints through the snow: a squirrel’s staccato scurry, the two friends’ merging paths. Bright sun uncovers patches of earth; the dog is eventually found (“Why are you saying he’s good:” “So he’ll like coming home”). And nightfall brings more snow — “Everyone whisper: fep fep fep…” Onomatopoeic language, offbeat details, and skillfully nuanced tones of earth and sky all convey the charms of quiet observation—of looking and listening, and of whispering, like softly falling snow. Joanna Rudge Long

Lynne Rae Perkins  All Alone in the Universe; illus. by the author
    Greenwillow
    Reviewed 9/99
Sketched simply, this is a story about the year two best friends became quietly less so; painted fully, it’s a portrait of a girl’s (and an author’s) intent obser-vation of the ordinary, and the power of language to make it art. The place is distinct but unspecified, the time is the early seventies: Dark Shadows is on TV, Three Dog Night is on the radio, a girl and her sister sleep “like two pearls sinking through Prell.” Debbie and Maureen are best friends, but Glenna has entered the picture, and Debbie is at a loss as to how or why that is, or what to do about it: “Three is a lousy number in a lot of ways. One of those ways is that carnivals always have rides with seats that hold two people, so one person has to act as if she doesn’t mind waiting by the fence or riding in a seat by herself or with some other leftover.” No, it isn’t shaping up to be a good summer for Debbie, and the ultimate betrayal comes when she realizes Maureen is going away on vacation with Glenna and her family. There’s no noisy breakup here, just a drifting away that owes as much to fate as it does to summer and to growing up. Debbie’s adjustment (a far too clinical word for the resolutely down-to-earth story) is painful but unmelodramatic, and her wry little pen drawings reveal a sense of humor and proportion that will serve her well. All along Perkins shows readers a world of friends waiting to be found, and so they are. One can’t know, of course, where autobiography plays a part in this exceptional first novel (Perkins is the author-artist of two first-rate picture books), but Debbie’s account of her trials is so rich with metaphors made manifest (“The house waited like a scraped knee”) that you feel at heart this is a story of an artist being born. Roger Sutton

Lynne Rae Perkins  Criss Cross
      Greenwillow
      Reviewed 9/05
Catching fireflies in a jar, fourteen-year-old Debbie (first met in Perkins’s spectacular debut novel All Alone in the Universe, rev. 9/99) watches the bugs’ “glow parts go on and off,” appeasing her guilt over capturing them by convincing herself that “once they were free, their small, basic brains would . . . have no memory of being imprisoned.” Perkins’s wonderfully contemplative and relaxed yet captivating second novel, again illustrated with her own perfectly idiosyncratic spot art, is a collection of fleeting images and sensations — some pleasurable, some painful, some a mix of both — from her ensemble cast’s lives. Like All Alone in the Universe, the story is set in a 1970s small town, but teen readers won’t have to be aware of the time period to feel connected to Debbie, Hector, Lenny, and the rest as the third-person narrative floats back and forth between their often humorous, gradually evolving perspectives. The book’s title refers to a radio show that the neighborhood teens listen to on Saturday evenings; on a thematic level, it also refers to those barely perceptible moments of missed communication between a boy and a girl, a parent and a child, when “something might have happened” but didn’t. In keeping with Perkins’s almost Zen-like tone, such flubbed opportunities are viewed as unfortunate but not tragic. “Maybe it was another time that their moments would meet.” Like a lazy summer day, the novel induces that exhilarating feeling that one has all the time in the world. Christine M. Heppermann

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