The Snail
by Emily Hughes; illus. by the author
Primary, Intermediate    Chronicle    88 pp.
11/22    9781797204673    $18.99

In this picture book for an older audience than Yang’s A Boy Named Isamu (rev. 9/21), Hughes presents an impressionistic biography of artist Isamu Noguchi. The book’s emotional journey begins with an elderly Noguchi shouting into a phone, angrily turning down an invitation to represent the United States in an important art exhibition. Rejected too many times in both America and Japan, Noguchi “felt like a snail and called himself one.” To calm down, he decides to build an akari, a lamp sculpted out of paper and bamboo, though difficult memories arise as he works. Born to a white American mother and a Japanese father, Noguchi grew up in both the U.S. and Japan yet never felt he belonged in either; World War II only deepened his sense of alienation. In her illustrations Hughes makes use of spirals and whorls to play with the snail theme: the artist often works so ferociously he’s like a “typhoon”; coiled shapes fill his memories—Japanese ferns, wood shavings, his curly hair as a child; and, finally, there’s the rounded shell-like body of the light-filled lamp, his finished product. Noguchi feels “love from the akari’s glow” and changes his mind about the invitation; his work at the ­exhibition ultimately includes a room filled with akari—“a room full of light.” In an author’s note, Hughes says that while critics at the time complained that the akari were too commercial, she considers them “sculptures of joy…of lightness, impermanence.” A brief bibliography is appended.

From the January/February 2023 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.