Here’s a book so beautiful you wish you could have the original art gracing your living room walls. I at least have the book perched atop a bookcase in a well-lit room. And it reads beautifully, too. Kwame Alexander’s lyrical free verse begs to be read aloud, which he did when he visited my school last January during his book tour, involving students in the poetry, rhythms, and sounds: the talking drum rhythms of “the motherland”; jazz, blues, and “electric newness”; “Amazing Grace” and the Jubilee Singers. He was surprised at how much his young audiences knew. He was in Music City, after all. Fisk University and the Jubilee Singers are just down the road, and kids of famous country music performers were in the audience. Kwame presented the same evening at Parnassus Books, accompanied by musician and artist Rod McGaha, whose trumpet accompaniments added another dimension to the text and art. 

It’s a book I appreciate on several levels, but it’s the art that concerns us here at Calling Caldecott. Charly Palmer considers his double-page, full-bleed, acrylic paintings a “visual interpretation” of the poetry. He is a fine artist and an illustrator, so an obvious question might be, “Is this fine art that decorates the page, or is this a children’s picture book in which there is an interplay of words and art, one playing off the other?” I think it’s the latter. Palmer’s illustrations are not tidy, framed decorations set apart from the text. From the title page on, they burst across the page, every page carrying landscapes, people, and text with them like a river. In this book, there is not one without the other. The book opens with the West African savanna, the drums, and the dancers arriving before the poems do, and when the words do, readers can see and hear what’s going on — dancers, drummers, and onomatopoeic text each an element of the whole. The double-page spread about Congo Square reminds me of R. Gregory Christie’s also-gorgeous interpretation of the open space in New Orleans in his illustrations for Freedom in Congo Square written by Carole Boston Weatherford and a 2017 Caldecott Honor book. Words can entreat us to listen, but it takes the illustrations to involve us in the work songs, to help us see.   

How will the illustrations fare before the Caldecott Committee? The Committee manual was revised pretty recently (March 2023), and, referring to definitions one and three on page 11, this book clearly offers a stunning “visual experience” and is “distinguished.”  The five criteria that follow in the manual really just identify five ways in which a book might be distinguished and to keep in mind so you are considering specific, common criteria and not just relying on the old “I know it when I see it” when it comes to excellence. Excellence of artistic technique, excellence of pictorial interpretation, etc. This volume doesn’t just satisfy the criteria, it wows the reader with excellence. One thing I wonder, though, is this: I came to love the book first by reading it by myself, then seeing Kwame Alexander perform it, then seeing kids get involved with it, and being in the bookstore audience when a jazz musician added a musical accompaniment. Even though the book certainly stands quite well on its own, I wonder if, for a child audience, the book is enough all by itself to stand out. It’s almost as if there is so much to this book and the history behind it that a child audience needs help to appreciate it all. Certainly, it’s an introduction to its subject, but in a committee’s estimation, as one picture book under consideration, will it fare as well as other wonderful books that do stand all by themselves? 

A selection of music is available online at https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/little-brown-young-readers/lbyr-blog/how-sweet-the-sound-the-official-playlist/?lens=little-brown-books-for-young-readers. 

[Read The Horn Book Magazine review of How Sweet the Sound]