[Many Calling Caldecott posts this season will begin with the Horn Book Magazine review of the featured book, followed by the post's author's critique.]

What stands out to me about The Three Billy Goats Gruff is the multitude of ways it uses the space available to it. As it opens, we see plenty of white space around the text, with the mysterious world under the bridge just creeping up from the bottom. The camera angle then shifts to let us focus on the troll for the entire verso page. After the Billy Goats Gruff enter the scene, the proscenium view Luann Toth describes above often goes across the bottom of the spread, with the height of the illustration varying. In a moment of high drama — and dramatic irony — we get the tallest across-the-spread illustration yet, as the legs of the clearly gigantic third Billy Goat Gruff appear behind the oblivious, relatively tiny troll. A few page-turns later, the focus moves in close for a wordless illustration: all we need to know is that the third billy goat’s head has successfully butted the troll (who, we see for the first time, has comically froglike legs that make him much less intimidating). 

And then come the waterfalls. The troll goes over a “Big” one, a “Huge” one, and finally a “Really Enormous” one, and as they get bigger, the illustrations expand horizontally. By “The Really Enormous Waterfall,” the text has become part of the visual experience: it's squeezed into such a narrow vertical space that it cascades downward, much like a — well, you get the idea. Finally, the goats have peacefully reached their destination as the sun sets, and we fade back into mysterious minimalism. 

The style and muted palette of the illustrations, “created with inks, watercolor, and graphite and compiled digitally,” will likely feel familiar to fans of Jon Klassen’s previous work — and Klassen, of course, is no stranger to the Caldecott. But none of that should matter to the committee members, who I’m sure will look closely at this title. How will it compare with the many, many serious contenders this year? 

They’ll have to cross that bridge when they come to it.