Peter Sís’s Robinson has been one of my 2017 favorites since the moment I first laid eyes on it. For one thing, on a personal (and superficial) level, I love that he captures on many of the book's spreads my favorite shades of blue. Oh, the beautiful blues here! Blue ties with yellow for My Favorite Color, so I’ve stared at these illustrations a lot this year. But let’s delve further to see what this book, beyond its palette, does so well, since the Caldecott committee looks at much, much more.

This is the story of a dream, and it’s based on an incident from Sís’s childhood (a closing author’s note explains as much). Young Sís, therefore, is our narrator, telling the story in an immediate, present-tense voice: “My friends and I love adventure.” They especially like to play pirates. When their school holds a costume party, the boy’s friends dress as pirates, but his mother convinces him to go as Robinson Crusoe, the hero from his favorite story. When he shows up in a costume his mother has constructed for him, his friends laugh at him; he runs home, falling ill; and he has a fevered dream about escaping to a small island and surviving on his own, much like Crusoe.

The book has a trim size that makes a statement: it’s large, hinting at the grand adventure inside. On the exquisite cover (look at those blues!) we see the boy sailing a boat. The book’s sail is a book, open to a picture of an island. It is, after all, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe that inspires the boy’s journey. Later, in the spread where the boy’s fever dream begins (the spread where we first see the ocean and a glimpse of the island he’ll visit), we see a progression of three tiny illustrations — in the first, the boy is sitting up in bed, reading; in the second, his bed has begun to morph into a boat, with the same book-as-sail; and the third shows a full-fledged, three-masted ship with massive sails. (I love the nod here to Where the Wild Things Are: "I float in and out of hours, or maybe days, until I am cast upon an island.") The notion that this is a journey of the imagination, guided by beloved stories, is reinforced by these book-as-sail images.

Much of the line work in this book communicates abundant meaning. When the boy shows up at the party and his friends mock him, the illustration is dissected by a spotlight from above that exposes the children in a white, triangular light, those angular lines conveying so much tension and drama. In two subsequent illustrations of the boy’s distress, we see more of these angular lines coming from open doors; in the one where he sleeps in his bedroom, the open entranceway foreshadows the exit he will take, a journey of the imagination to a new land.

Sís is an illustrator known for his detailed artwork. Here, he provides just the right amount of detail, never overwhelming the reader. He uses panels on the very first spread to break up the action and emphasize how much he and his friends enjoy imaginative play as pirates. A couple of illustrations are bordered by smaller panels of artwork. The one in which he dons the Robinson Crusoe costume, ready to head to the party, is bordered by 14 smaller illustrations, showing precisely how he becomes Crusoe. All of these smaller, paneled illustrations fall away and become expansive full-bleed spreads when the boy arrives on the tropical island, taking in this new world, learning autonomy, and finding his courage.

There is much to appreciate in the atmosphere Sís constructs throughout the book, primarily via that gorgeous palette and the emotions it facilitates. When the boy arrives on the island (unlike Robinson Crusoe, there are no humans on this island), lines fall away and the book explodes in dreamlike color. Sís also plays with styles here. One spread (“I find water and something to eat”) is reminiscent of botanical art of the 1800s. In other spreads, Sís seems to go full-on Gauguin (Gauguin himself spent time on the Caribbean island of Martinique). One spread even looks very Chagall-esque. What will committee members make of the Caldecott criterion that calls for “appropriateness of style of illustration to the story, theme or concept” in a book that plays so creatively with styles?

Just last week someone asked me what my top three picks would be if I were on the committee right now. Robinson has been a favorite for me since its publication, but there are so many other excellent books, many that have been covered at Calling Caldecott already and some that are to come. Would Robinson stay in my top three or get crowded out? It’s such a tough choice that I throw my hands up and walk away, but committee members aren’t afforded that option. Which is to say: it’s been a good year for picture books, huh? But it’s also to say: let’s take a moment to appreciate the gravity of the committee’s decision and how challenging the task assigned to them. In a little over nine weeks, they’ll gather on the isolated tropical island that is a closed-door ALA committee room and make those hard choices.

Read the Horn Book Magazine review of Robinson.