Boston Globe–Horn Book Award
Special Citations

1, 2, 3 by Tana Hoban
     12 pp. Greenwillow
     Reviewed 9/85
This superb counting book is intended for toddlers, ages twelve to twenty-four months. A perfect board book, 1, 2, 3 combines subjects, photographs, design, and color in the right manner for beginning counters. From one birthday cake with one candle to ten toes — “piggies” shouted a two-year-old gleefully — each chosen object is familiar to very young children. Each page uses about five-sixths of the space for the illustrative photo and the appropriate numeral, with the bottom space used for the corresponding number of dots and the number word. The photographs are of excellent quality and color definition. You can even count the stripes on the zebra animal cracker! The careful craftsmanship extends to the back cover (traditionally the title page in board books) where three items — measuring cups — repeat the primary colors used on the front cover for the three blocks. Adults will be drawn to 1, 2, 3 as readily as children. Books like this one should be sold in six-packs! ELIZABETH S. WATSON

Valentine & Orson by Nancy Ekholm Burkert
     48 pp. Farrar
     Reviewed 1/90
“I am now encouraged to put this Old Story into a New Livery, and not to suffer that to lie Buried that a little Cost may keep Alive.” Introducing the author-artist’s afterword, this quotation from the 1688 edition might well serve as a short, pithy description of both purpose and achievement. The story, here “cast in new livery,” is a widely-known romance from the medieval period, telling of twin brothers of royal lineage who are separated at birth. One, Valentine, is brought to the court of Pepin, king of France, and raised in the chivalric tradition. The other, Orson, is abducted by a bear and grows to manhood as one of her cubs. Eventually knight and wild man meet; enmity is transformed into friendship as they try to discover their true identities. The quest is successful. Evil is punished; virtue triumphs; and love conquers all. The story’s appeal is not difficult to understand, for it fuses human desires with exotic elements in the best tradition of the fairy tale — or of many a great novel, for that matter. It is also fascinating as the medieval version of the nature versus nurture controversy — one which supports the notion that nobility and goodness are innate, rather than accidental, characteristics. Burkert has elected to transform the story into a folk play, narrated by the whimsical enchanter, Pacolet, and presented by a group of itinerant players. This device allows her to underscore the importance of reconciliation and love rather than focusing on bloodshed and hate. The players’ equipment is improvised from farm implements or household goods; weapons have been beaten into plowshares. The illustrations are exquisite — elegant but not precious, exuberant but controlled. Glowing with the luminescence of watercolors, they are, at the same time, remarkable for incredible detail and texture. Like great tapestries, the painstaking execution of the idea is awe-inspiring. In keeping with the medieval mode, the story is retold in iambic pentameter couplets, reflecting its origins as a poem. The text, as a consequence, works best when interpreted aloud by a competent reader. It is, however, far less cumbersome as an introduction to the medieval style than samples of Middle English usually found in textbook anthologies; thus, the book could be introduced in the upper grades as a useful — and aesthetically pleasing — addition to standard curricula. Given the demands made on the reader, belied by the format, this book is difficult to classify. It will find its own audience, but that audience is not easily defined by age or grade. MARY M. BURNS

The Changing City by Jörg Müller
     8 pictures. McElderry/Atheneum
The Changing Countryside by Jörg Müller
     7 pictures. McElderry/Atheneum
     Reviewed 8/77
A portfolio of fold-out illustrations opening out to thirty-three and a half inches depicts the physical changes in a European city over a period of twenty-three years, from 1953 to 1976. Each successive picture portrays the same scene after a period of about three years has passed. Different seasons and times of day give variety to the panoramas, but the great interest lies in the details of the changes in the face of the city. Fine old buildings and trees are destroyed; new highways are constructed. In almost every picture a disaster is taking place in the background — a fire, an accident, a demonstration; and some figures recur in every picture. A blind man with a seeing-eye dog represents the disaster in the final picture; he has been struck by a car. Hippies appear and disappear; increasing internationalization makes the signs more and more universal, such as Sprite, Sony, Kodak; and the dominance of the automobile has effectively removed all the appurtenances of civilized living. Certainly a graphic and powerful expression of the encroachment of technology on the city.

In a companion work the same theme is carried out in pictures of the changes taking place when a farming community turns into a suburb. The town is, in fact, Güllen, to which the highway signs point in the city pictures. Among the most notable changes shown are the steadily shrinking recreational opportunities for children; ponds, streams, hills, and fields disappear, and only one small playground is left. The factories which spring up all around and, indeed, all the industrial buildings, are remarkable for their coldly repellent modern architecture. Although European in conception and presentation, the significance of the pictures is universal. ANN A. FLOWERS

Tibet: Through the Red Box by Peter Sís
     57 pp. Farrar
     Reviewed 11/98
A gauzy, translucent jacket printed with a faint, seductive map covers a full-color painting of a maze with a mountainous city at its heart. An apt invitation indeed to this mystical, mysterious picture book, which tells of the artist’s father’s journey to Tibet in the 1950s, the stories he told upon his return, and the adult Peter’s response to his father’s diaries of the trip. Initially told he was being sent to China to teach filmmaking, Sís’s father soon realized that he in fact was there to document the takeover of Tibet. An avalanche causes him to lose company with most of his party; soon thereafter, a boy dressed in red and wearing bells appears in the wilderness to bring the elder Sís a letter from his wife in Prague. A trail left by the boy leads Sís to Lhasa, where, after encounters with the Yeti and a lake with human-faced fish, he is able to deliver to the young Dalai Lama word of the Chinese invasion. True? Who knows? Although the book contains no notes to sort story from myth, it details a quest made convincing, paradoxically, by both text and pictures’ matter-of-fact acceptance of the magical. As the grown Peter reads his father’s diary of the journey, the room he is in “becomes red,” then green, then blue, just as his father saw the shifting shades of color in the rooms of the Dalai Lama’s Potala palace — “and at last a deep, dark room. The Dalai Lama smiled and lifted his hand, and my father heard the gentle jingle of bells.” The art is appropriately transcendental, with cryptic and maze-like wheels of life, double-spread renditions of the Tibetan landscape that seem to breathe with life, and pictures of the room in which Sís reads the diary that reveal an internal, emotional landscape. The text is filled with smaller images, almost graffiti-like drawings, that lend credence to the “found-papers” aspect of the tale. Issued on the adult list by the publisher, this book will have audiences of all ages completely involved in this Lost Horizon of the imagination. R.S.

The Arrival by Shaun Tan
    128 pp. Levine/Scholastic
    Reviewed 11/07
From a bleak, sunless city haunted by the threat of scaled and serpentine monsters, a man sets forth to seek a new life in a new land, leaving his wife and daughter behind. His steamship voyage with a host of refugees takes him to a strange shore indeed, a country with its own architecture, alphabet, technologies — even the pets look different. It’s the triumph of this lavish yet somberly monochromatic wordless book that readers are put right into the refugee's shoes: we’re as out of place as he, learning the customs of the country in step with the protagonist. With him, for example, we figure out how to use the transport system, and once aloft in the steam-driven air-ferry, we sit alongside him as another passenger tells her own story of imprisonment and escape. Small, meticulously composed square panels, sometimes twelve to a page, move the action along while larger pictures and double-page spreads display surreally majestic cityscapes as well as scenes of the disaster and oppression that led the nameless protagonist and others to seek this welcoming land. Subtle shifts from gray to brown to golden tones underline the chiaroscuro of the story's themes; all is warm light when the man and his family are united once again. R.S.

More Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards | List of all reviews on this site