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Lies, Knives, and Girls in Red Dresses

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Beach-Time Brenda's next adventure?

From the May/June 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine:
Reviewer Christine Hepperman asks Traction Man and the Beach Odyssey author/illustrator Mini Grey about a new favorite character. Read the full review of Traction Man and the Beach Odyssey here.

Christine M. Hepperman: Will Beach-Time Brenda reappear in future books, maybe headline a series of her own?

Mini Grey: Oooh—there’s an idea. Poor Brenda might have to wrestle with some undignified situations in the ordinary world, but perhaps save the day through the power of cocktail snacks, canapés, and optimism. I can see her battling household appliances and all sorts of other horrors and having to get very very dirty. But she’d need a sidekick—or could she share Scrubbing Brush?

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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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Table of Contents

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