Less a story than a book about an idea, the central message of Corinna Luyken’s debut, The Book of Mistakes, appears as paratextual coda on the back of the jacket: “Set your imagination free.” According to Caldecott criteria, the Caldecott is "not for didactic intent,” but Luyken delivers her message as a masterful celebration of creativity rather than a lesson. Its central premise — that “mistakes” are opportunities for inspiration — never feels heavy-handed. Instead, inventive, engaging, metafictive text and illustration fulfill the criterion of “excellence of presentation in recognition of a child audience,” while positioning the book as a resource for adults keen on encouraging kids to, in the words of Ms. Frizzle, “take chances, make mistakes, get messy!” Taking a chance myself, I’ll say it’d be a mistake for the 2018 Caldecott Committee to overlook this stunning, playful picture book.

The portrait layout’s generous trim size makes immediate visual impact with striking jacket art that depicts children grasping a bunch of balloons lifting them into empty, white space. The fearlessness of this open background acts as precursor to nearly empty opening pages, which gradually give way to increasingly complex compositions. But before heading into the book proper, there’s more to consider about layout, jacket, and case design. First, look at the low, small depiction of a boy on the back of the jacket looking up at the floating children.

Is this a “mistake”? Was he left behind?

Acknowledging the plural titular noun, “Mistakes,” and examining display type, look, too, at how the floating children and balloons disrupt the title.

Another “mistake”?

Remove the jacket to examine the case, which omits words and provides more detail for the left-behind boy: his now-visible unicycle is outfitted with a big balloon.

Will he pedal forth and soar into the sky after the others?

The stage now set to test theories about the narrative, open the book to pause at the endpapers, which are expanses of white marred by two black inkblots.

Even more “mistakes”?

Perhaps. But their placement seems deliberate, since they’re positioned in the same places as the floating children and the boy. This minimal, intentional design introduces the inkblot motif found on future pages, and their positions anticipate how interior compositions exploit the portrait layout by reaching for upper and lower heights to emphasize space, movement, and perspective — elements key to the ensuing, complex visual narrative.

Turn to the dedication page, and you’ll find a small animal (later called “the frog-cat-cow thing”) and another inkblot on the title page — right on the i in “Mistakes.” These details prompt readers to expect them on subsequent pages, just as jacket art introduced human characters who will reappear. The first such character shows up in the opening spread as a tiny, incomplete sketch of a face with one eye, one ear, a nose, and a mere suggestion of an eyebrow. “It started,” reads spare, accompanying text, and a page-turn completes the sentence: “with one mistake.” Now the face has a line for a mouth, penciled-in hair, another tiny eyebrow, and a big, black circle of an eye, far larger than the first, small eye. That text doesn’t specify this outsized second eye as the “one mistake” allows readers to name it themselves. Luyken trusts readers to fill in gaps and comprehend how words and pictures work together, a responsibility that reinforces the trust she places in the creative process by positioning reading as a creative act aimed at making meaning. In a picture as simple as this one, it’s an easy task that prepares readers for ever closer examination of ensuing spreads.

In these early pages, Luyken transforms the eyes into glasses, establishing a pattern of “mistakes” providing creative inspiration. She thus presents art-making as a kind of problem-solving. This doesn’t come across as a slog, but as a process that demands a playful mindset undeterred and, indeed, fed by mistakes. The apparent pleasure Luyken takes in her process translates into pleasurable engagement for readers, as pages with “mistakes” like “the elbow and the extra-long neck” provoke laughter at how she plays with rules of proportion. Clearly, she’s an artist who knows the rules and can therefore break them for humorous effect.

But there’s more than humor here; paratextual promises are kept, too. The evolving drawing of the bespectacled face emerges as a quirky roller-skating girl, recognizable as one of the floating children from front jacket art. This connection provokes wondering about the balloons and when they and the other children will reappear. Luyken soon delivers and fills subsequent pictures with those details observed early on. The result is bookish wish-fulfillment — we get what we expect, and we get much more, too. The balloons? They’re delivered by the roller-skating girl in wordless spreads that invite readers to narrate her progress toward a massive tree. The other children? They’re cavorting among the tree’s branches.

Play with visual perspective then seizes control to make setting become character and (perhaps) character, self-portrait. A textual shift to the second person implicates the reader in the metafictive results: “Do you see—” it asks as shadows creep in inky darkness on the lower part of the spread. A page-turn zooms out much farther, with blackness dominating the verso, while the scene of the roller-skating girl approaching the tree with the balloons becomes ever smaller, but remains recognizable, in the lower recto.

Delighted interjections abound at storytime when the shadowy landscape transforms into the huge, helmeted head of the roller-skating girl, with the tree scene sprouting from the top of her head. Then, perspective zooms out to cast her not just as a skater, but an artist drawing the same, slight sketches that opened the book, and positioning her as a sort of self-portrait of the artist as a young girl. As one child at storytime remarked, “Since the girl in the book is the one making the pictures of herself, it’s like she’s the real artist. We’re seeing how the real artist thinks.”

It’s extremely satisfying that something so unexpected culminates a book whose paratexts initially guide readers to search for and find the expected, and this child’s comment seems an ideal articulation of what this picture book does so well: it captures Luyken’s imaginative, creative process in order to “set … free” readers’ imaginations. The playfulness of her words and pictures as she achieves this paradoxical feat exemplifies the Caldecott criterion of “excellence of pictorial interpretation of story, theme, or concept,” leading me to conclude that there can be no mistake about it: this is a picture book worthy of Caldecott recognition.

Read the Horn Book Guide review of The Book of Mistakes.

Save

Save