Peter Sís holding his Hans Christian Andersen medal. Photo by Milada Fiserova.

I was illustrating before I knew what illustrating means. And I knew Hans Christian Andersen stories before I knew who he was.

I was always drawing because I was a child growing up in the age before television, computers, and iPhones. I did not know anything about the size of my country or the politics of the time. I was told stories and fairy tales by my grandparents, parents, and other relatives. It all became one wonderful story really: “The Magic Tinderbox,” my grandfather’s trip to America, and my father’s adventures in Tibet. It was not until much later that I found out my grandfather had designed railways in America, my father really traveled to Tibet, and the haunting fairy tales I loved were written by Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, Karel Jaromír Erben, Božena Němcová, and many others.

My mother, an artist, was always making sure I had paper and pencils. And I drew pictures as early as I can remember and on every surface possible — newspapers, walls, light switches, chairs, and even the door of our fridge.

It was time to grow up and go to school, and my drawing came in handy. Fellow students liked me because of my funny drawings of them, but the teachers were less impressed (especially in the science classes). So it was determined, as was the custom then, that at age fifteen I would be a student at the art school.

At the Middle School of Applied Arts, I was supposed to be painting realistic flowers and fruit while I was instead drawing pictures of the Beatles and their Yellow Submarine. I did not fit the expectations of the serious artist at that time. I had doubts about my future until Jiří Trnka picked up my portfolio when selecting five students for his new class at the Academy of Applied Arts in the spring of 1968. Now this was special! Jiří Trnka, the most amazing artist, illustrator, and filmmaker, would be my mentor! And freedom was in the air! Prague, spring 1968, was the best time of my life. We could play rock music and stage avant-garde theater, grow long hair, draw Beatles, and travel outside the country.

It all came to a crashing end in August while I was visiting Denmark, of all places. While many of my generation were trying to get out of Czechoslovakia, I was trying to return home to Prague. Jiří Trnka was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1968, but could not get to the IBBY congress in Switzerland that year because of politics and tanks in the streets of Prague. He died in 1969 at the young age of fifty-nine, some say because of sadness about what happened to Czechoslovakia. Still, I had a year to learn from him. I wanted to make films like him. He wanted me to be an illustrator. “Too many producers telling you what to do in film,” he warned me. “To be a good illustrator you must be a true artist — and that is hard — and it can get very lonely sometimes.”

But I was making films, and they could take me places. Filmmaking gave me the chance to attend the Royal College of Art in London where Quentin Blake, yet another Hans Christian Andersen Award laureate (2002), tutored me in the department of illustration. I remember I asked him what color to use as the background for the picture I was working on, and he said something very different from what I would hear in the Central European tradition: “Just think what is the color you want — deep down you know — you are just asking me because you want to be sure.”

Still, I was no illustrator, even though I had done pictures for a book here and there. An animated film I made won the Golden Bear Award at the West Berlin Film Festival, and Hollywood and the world of film were calling. I was sent to America in 1982 to make an animated short for the summer Olympic Games. First it was all great — palm trees and swimming pools — and then it did not go so well, because the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries decided to boycott the Olympics. I was ordered to go back. What to do? I stayed to finish the film. But there was no use for it in the end! So here I was, out of a job, out of my country, when, just like in a good fairy tale, a third Hans Christian Andersen Award for Illustration recipient comes to the rescue. Maurice Sendak, upon seeing my work, agrees to introduce me to the publishing world! He asked: “So — you want to be an illustrator? Are you sure?” / Oh I was sure–I was desperate… / He continued: “It is not just for your glory as an artist. You are responsible to the children. You have to be truthful and remember what you wished for when you were growing up.”

You can follow your dream…but follow the dream of every child as much as you can…

And this is when I became an illustrator. First making pictures for other people’s books, then coming up with my own stories—about my childhood, about leaving home, and about exploring the world. I found out that one doesn’t have to discover new continents, that people can explore in their minds even when locked in a prison cell, and that books can be my home, my language, my country. I can share with my children and children of the world the universe of dreamers, seekers, and people who dared to think differently. Books are bridges taking you places…

One of the first bridges for children was built by the Czech educator and philosopher Jan Ámos Komenský. His was the first illustrated book for children in the Western world: Orbis Pictus, published in the seventeenth century. It was teaching people how to live together in peace…teaching language, building bridges…

I grew up near the Charles Bridge in Prague — a bridge with ancient statues where many people have walked through many ages…and where I believed as a boy I could meet all of them on a full moon night…

Mozart…Galileo…Darwin…Saint-Exupéry…

Oh…do I see Mr. Andersen with his tall hat over there?

Thank you, Mr. Andersen.

Thank you, my mentors…I know that all of you have walked here.

Thank you for showing me the way.

I am trying to do the same thing.

Thank you, Jella Lepman, for building “A Bridge of Children Books” many years ago.

Thank you, IBBY — for building the bridges — all over the planet.

Adapted from Peter Sís’s 2012 Hans Christian Andersen Illustrator Award speech. This article is part of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage.

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The New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2012 have just been announced via Twitter. This year marks the 60th anniversary of this annual picture book award.

Judges Chris Raschka, Bruce Handy (Vanity Fair), and Cathryn Mercier (director of the Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at Simmons College) selected the following ten titles to receive the honor:

Bear Despair written and illustrated by Gaëtan Dorémus (Enchanted Lion)
The Beetle Book written and illustrated by Steve Jenkins (Houghton)
House Held Up by Trees written by Ted Kooser; illustrated by Jon Klassen (Candlewick)
The Hueys in the New Sweater written and illustrated by Oliver Jeffers (Philomel)
Infinity and Me written by Kate Hosford; illustrated by Gabi Swiatkowska (Carolrhoda)
Little Bird written by Germano Zullo; illustrated by Albertine (Enchanted Lion)
One Times Square: A Century of Change at the Crossroads of the World written and illustrated by Joe McKendry (Godine)
Red Knit Cap Girl written and illustrated by Naoko Stoop (Tingley/Little)
Stephen and the Beetle written by Jorge Luján; illustrated by Chiara Carrer (Groundwood)
Unspoken: A Story from the Underground Railroad written and illustrated by Henry Cole (Scholastic)

Thanks to Katie Bircher for compiling from the NYT Tweets and checking all the titles and names. Now Robin and I have to find all of these and see what we think. In the meantime, what do YOU think?

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Photo courtesy Emily Arnold McCully

Emily Arnold McCully received the 1993 Caldecott Medal for Mirette on the High Wire, the story of a 19th-century Parisian girl who learns to walk the high wire and, in the process, helps her mentor overcome his fears. Which of the books below is the illustrator’s favorite Caldecott-winning picture book?

a) The Man Who Walked Between the Towers by Mordicai Gerstein (2004)
b) Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey (1942)
c) Ox-Cart Man written by Donald Hall and illustrated by Barbara Cooney (1980)

This post is part of our ongoing game matching Newbery and Caldecott medalists to their favorite winning titles. To see more entries, click on the tag matching game.

Previously: Neil Gaiman, Erin E. Stead, Lois Lowry, Linda Sue Park, Beth Krommes, Susan Cooper, Jerry Pinkney, Paul O. Zelinsky, Russell Freedman, and Sharon Creech.

Coming soon: David Wiesner, Robin McKinley, and Laura Amy Schlitz.

Illustration by Devon Johnson

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Photo by Lyle Riggs

Sharon Creech received the 1995 Newbery Medal for Walk Two Moons, the tale of 13-year-old Sal’s quest to find her missing mother. Can you guess her favorite Newbery-winning novel?

a) Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor (1992)
b) Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis (2000)
c) Dicey’s Song by Cynthia Voight (1983)

This post is part of our ongoing game matching Newbery and Caldecott medalists to their favorite winning titles. To see more entries, click on the tag matching game.

Previously: Neil Gaiman, Erin E. Stead, Lois Lowry, Linda Sue Park, Beth Krommes, Susan Cooper, Jerry Pinkney, Paul O. Zelinsky, and Russell Freedman.

Coming soon: David Wiesner, Laura Amy Schlitz, and Emily Arnold McCully.

Illustration by Devon Johnson

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Photo by Evans Chan

Russell Freedman received the 1988 Newbery Medal for his meticulously researched Lincoln: A Photobiography. Which of these books is the historian’s favorite Newbery winner?

a) Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George (1973)
b) The Story of Mankind by Hendrick Willem van Loon (1922)
c) A Year Down Yonder by Richard Peck (2001)

This post is part of our ongoing game matching Newbery and Caldecott medalists to their favorite winning titles. To see more entries, click on the tag matching game.

Previously: Neil Gaiman, Erin E. Stead, Lois Lowry, Linda Sue Park, Beth Krommes, Susan Cooper, Jerry Pinkney, and Paul O. Zelinsky.

Coming soon: David Wiesner, Laura Amy Schlitz, and Sharon Creech.

Illustration by Devon Johnson

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The post 2012 Mind the Gap Awards appeared first on The Horn Book.

Photo by Rachel Zelinsky

Paul O. Zelinsky took home the 1998 Caldecott Medal for the lush oil paintings in his retelling of Rapunzel. Guess which of the following titles is the illustrator’s favorite Caldecott-stickered book.

a) Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears written by Margaret Musgrove and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon (1977)
b) Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey (1942)
c) Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak (1964)

This post is part of our ongoing game matching Newbery and Caldecott medalists to their favorite winning titles. To see more entries, click on the tag matching game.

Previously: Neil Gaiman, Erin E. Stead, Lois Lowry, Linda Sue Park, Beth Krommes, Susan Cooper, and Jerry Pinkney.

Coming soon: Russell Freedman, David Wiesner, and Emily Arnold McCully.

Illustration by Devon Johnson

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Newbery speculation is alive and healthy, with even the mock awards receiving national news coverage (and with the USA Today reporter who interviewed me also confiding that his fifth-grade son was participating in one). Happily, the growing din of the buzz doesn’t seem to affect the pleasure of the surprise at the award press conference.

Perhaps the least surprising this year was the first honor announced: Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out & Back Again. It received starred reviews in many of the major review publications, was on most of their “best of ” lists for the year, and won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Still, it stretches the Newbery canon both with its form, becoming one of only three verse novels ever to be honored (along with Karen Hesse’s winner Out of the Dust in 1998 and Margarita Engle’s honor book The Surrender Tree in 2009), and with its authorship, as nonwhite and first-time authors still seem underrepresented on the list. Lai’s verse form makes her protagonists’ observations tangible—small moments given as much attention as the large ones, as in real life—providing an engaging lens for a story that is both specific and universal.

Eugene Yelchin’s Breaking Stalin’s Nose, however, took nearly everyone by surprise (its inclusion on The Horn Book’s Fanfare list its only previous major notice). It also extends the Newbery canon by offering a very short, illustrated novel, one that delivers many layers through its prose and plants ideas that unfurl in the reader’s mind long after the narrative has forged its path. Yelchin is an artist, a character designer for animated film (including the Oscar-winning Rango), and has illustrated many picture books, including collaborations with his writer wife. He clearly understands the role that image plays in story, and he uses it to great effect in his intimate and active present-tense narrative.

The story of a family adjusting to a new life in the United States after fleeing Communist Vietnam; and the story of a boy in Stalinist Russia. It’s hard, with this sole pair of honor books, not to notice the Cold War setting of the year’s Newbery Medal winner, Dead End in Norvelt. The week before the Newbery awards were announced, in fact, Dead End had been selected as the winner of the Scott O’Dell Award for historical fiction, casting the book in a new light for me. (Is it “historical fiction”? I guess so…as much as it is “a funny book,” as I heard someone delight moments after the announcements: “Finally, a funny book wins the Newbery!”) Here, the shadow of communism is really setting more than subject, but it makes for an amazing coincidence that’s worth pointing out, if only to understand how truly coincidental it must be. The Newbery committee does not consider the didactic content of the books under consideration. It deliberates on the literary aspects of the works, including “interpretation of theme or concept”… that is, how well the authors deliver their message, rather than the message itself. And every Newbery committee stumbles across pairs of coincidences in its year of reading. (One year when I served there were two titles in which the respective protagonists each lost an arm to a wild animal.)

The stories themselves are all radically different, as are the styles. If Yelchin’s tool is image, as I’ve suggested, then Lai’s is voice, and Gantos’s…well, humor! Yet aside from the noted coincidence, in a year that boasted a broad field of books with a variety of distinguished literary elements, I think these three, and especially the two honors, show particular strength in “interpretation of theme or concept” above the other criteria. Though the number of honor books is up to the discretion of the committee, they must be the next titles in highest total points on the final ballot taken (those who want to understand more of the intricacies of the voting process can Google “Newbery Manual”). So the honors speak directly to what was considered the most distinguished—individual title by individual title—that year. But we also can’t help ourselves in asking what indirect statement they make about the year’s range, and while each year’s set of honors shows us different aspects of “distinguished literature for children,” in this year’s I see a fairly homogeneous concept.

So, what other examples of “distinguished literature” should we not forget from this year? Though it’s impossible to predict the awards, this year was particularly challenging as buzz about the cream of the crop was all over the map.

There were several nonfiction titles strong enough in writing alone that I could have seen them joining the ranks of An American Plague; Claudette Colvin; The Voice That Challenged a Nation; and Hitler Youth…all recent Newbery Honor–winning nonfiction titles. Candace Fleming’s Amelia Lost (one of the winners of the online Heavy Medal Mock Newbery I run with Jonathan Hunt) created a “you are there” immediacy by interspersing the author’s overview of Amelia Earhart’s career (warts and all) with shifting point-of-view asides from those who listened in to the radio reports of her final flight. Karen Blumenthal’s Bootleg took a well-known chapter of American history (Prohibition) and turned it into a riveting political narrative, while Sally M. Walker’s Blizzard of Glass took a neglected chapter of history (the Halifax Explosion of 1917) and made it horrifyingly relevant.

Some of the other best candidates last year were challenged by the Newbery criteria’s focus exclusively on text, and by the “apples and oranges” problem that makes books with more text stand out better than books with less, although quantity is clearly not supposed to enter into it, according to the terms. Among my favorites:

Drawing from Memory by Allen Say. In a book that defies categorization, it is the interplay of text and illustration, of pacing, and rhythm, and shifts in tone of both, that makes it distinguished. Few ALA award criteria celebrate this kind of artistry, even though it epitomizes a wholly realized book. Happily, the Sibert committee did recognize it with an honor.

Swirl by Swirl: Spirals in Nature. Yes, Joyce Sidman won a Newbery Honor last year for a similar book, Dark Emperor & Other Poems of the Night, but this one is distinguished for different reasons, and in any case each year’s committee doesn’t concern itself with anything else but its year’s books. There are 153 words in Sidman’s main text, and they do triple duty in providing information, a comforting laptime story, and toothsome poetry.

Brock Cole is undersung for his picture book texts, as his divine illustrations play equal part in the storytelling. Read The Money We’ll Save aloud to hear the artistry in his perfectly timed narrative rhythm and humor. A familiar plot shape gets a vaudevillian twist cued exactly to its audience’s appreciations.

There were many other exemplary books this year with a more “traditional” Newbery cast and clear literary merit. Was A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness felled by eligibility issues? His text stands out as one of the most technically adept of the year. Did Franny Billingsley’s Chime just not cut the committee’s interpretation of a book for “children…up to and including age 14”? It might not be a “children’s” book when it comes down to it, but it certainly has an extraordinarily well developed magical setting. Was Jennifer L. Holm’s simultaneously hilarious and chilling The Trouble with May Amelia just one of those “love it or hate it” titles that depends upon that year’s committee makeup to sway it one way or the other? It’s hard to find a lazy word in her short and zinging novel.

Or, perhaps, did we all just talk some of these (and others) up too much? It gets harder every year to see past the public excitement during award season. We’re discussing the literary merits of the year’s best books: this is good! But it’s challenging to remember that the committee reads further and deeper than any of us.

This year, however, I do think we may have publicly exhausted the merits and faults of one book: Gary D. Schmidt’s Okay for Now. Bizarre cover-art resemblance to the winner’s aside, this title was probably the closest thing to a “shoo-in” we could have had this year, next to Inside Out & Back Again. So when I saw Lai’s name on the screen at the press conference (the honors are generally announced alphabetically by author), I was pretty sure we’d see Schmidt’s. I had been wowed by his ability to establish setting without ever overtly showing it, and by the fullness and breadth of his characterization and the genuineness evoked by his narrator. Doug’s voice carries just enough teenaged bluster that we have to sometimes read between the lines, making him more true-to-life than most protagonists we met last year. And in a year in which several short texts stood out, Okay for Now took its readers further, word for word, than any other novel of its heft. Schmidt’s prose is distinguished. It’s also, somehow, in its enthusiasm, sloppy. While no Newbery winner is flawless, a preponderance of eyebrow-raisers in a plot not only makes consensus challenging but also, at some point, makes a book less distinguished. With Okay for Now ranked number one on the Goodreads Newbery poll right out of the gate and probably the most publicly discussed contender, the buzz did get snarly around this one, especially when it garnered no award seals at all. But buzz is flighty…once we’re each over any mild embarrassment in having been so off-target in our predictions, it’s easy to return to the delight of the committee’s selection of its winner.

Dead End in Norvelt was not unnoticed before the announcements, with three starred reviews, a Horn Book Fanfare citation, appearances on Kirkus and PW’s “best of” lists, and the Scott O’Dell Award. But it looked like a hard sell for committee consensus simply because it is so outlandish. Here we have a fictional Jack Gantos, reputably more or less the real one, but amped up in parts for comic or tragic effect. The twelve-year-old Gantos sees fully that adults are as off-base and weird as kids, and this, appropriately, scares him. Wildly aimed humor and nosebleeds seem to be his coping mechanisms…as if he has to fail at things spectacularly, or at least make a mess of them, in order to see the world clearly: probably a habit learned by trying to please such temperamentally mismatched parents. The even odder Mrs. Volker somehow makes a balancing trio of role models for Jack, and provides some of the best center-stage humor in the book. (“I want you to take a sleeve of Thin Mints and line them up on the edge of the kitchen counter and then when I’m hungry I can just bend over and sweep a cookie into my mouth like I’m scoring a goal in hockey.”) It is historical fiction, and a funny book, and somehow, strangely, a cautionary tale. Gantos uses the historical backdrop to reveal the at-odds views of his parents, allowing him to develop his character’s political perspective simultaneously with the personal. His father desires “progress” but feels challenged by threats real or imagined, while his mother cherishes the socially progressive values of the founders of her hometown. When Mom tries to barter with the doctor, when Dad determines to build a bomb shelter…Gantos is at once embarrassed, proud, and intrigued. He lights a path for his fictional self, and for any of his readers who care to follow, to become an ethically confused, emotionally sound, and ultimately thoughtful adult.

In my whole year of reading, Dead End achieved two of my favorite literary effects. It actually delivered on its preposterous hints of murder…which seem so clearly to have been laid as a comic red-herring that when it turns out there had been a murderer afoot killing little old ladies, the reader guffaws, thereby becoming more outlandish and inappropriate than the characters in the book (they are horrified). He also wrote my favorite ending of the year, a flying leap that could have been the mother of all belly flops but isn’t, because he pulls himself together with a tiny bit of empathy and wisdom at the last possible minute (actually, perhaps a minute past the last one)…thereby assuring us that we’re not unredeemable, ourselves.

Like an ill-advised combo of pizza toppings that turns out to be fabulous, Gantos’s startling blend of humor and humility shoots high and, well, gives us something to remember. Which—his readers will recall—is his point.

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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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Photo by Thomas Kristich

In 2010, Jerry Pinkney received the Caldecott Medal for his near-wordless, Serengeti-set retelling of Aesop’s fable The Lion and the Mouse. Guess which of the titles below is his favorite Caldecott-winning picture book.

a) Tuesday by David Wiesner (1992)
b) The Hello, Goodbye Window by Chris Raschka (2006)
c) Rapunzel by Paul O. Zelinsky (1998)

This post is part of our ongoing game matching Newbery and Caldecott medalists to their favorite winning titles. To see more entries, click on the tag matching game.

Previously: Neil Gaiman, Erin E. Stead, Lois Lowry, Linda Sue Park, Beth Krommes, and Susan Cooper.

Coming soon: Sharon Creech, Russell Freedman, and Emily Arnold McCully.

Illustration by Devon Johnson

The post “My Favorite Caldecott” matching game featuring Jerry Pinkney appeared first on The Horn Book.