This year I almost gave away the Caldecott-winning picture book.
"Wait, that's a really cool book," said my daughter, who had briefly left the comfort of her apartment's steady stream of expanded TV channels to dine at home.
I looked again at David Weisner's Flotsam (Clarion, $17.00, ages 5 and up). Would he stealing the award from a picture book with strong words for the third time? "Okay," I told myself, "His art's amazing and that is what the award is for." Recognizing my prejudice, I looked again.
Flotsam is more layered than Weisner's other books. It begins with a first page almost filled with an illustration of a shocked-looking crab. This is a good intial image for a book full of visual surprises. A giant eye looms in the background and a page turn reveals that it's no underwater predator, but a boy examining the crab under a magnifying glass. This boy has come to the beach equipped with shovels, buckets, a microscope and a curious mind. Soon he discovers an old underwater camera washed up on the beach. The boy develops the film and the photos reveal a fantastical undersea world. Weisner's vibrant pictures leading us to ocean depths where we see oddities like a blue octopus reading aloud in a cozy underwater living room. More pictures become a portal to the past when the curious boy views children from other eras holding pictures of children from even longer ago, generations have held this magical camera!
The ending is predictable, but it's a journey of contrasts well-worth taking as Weisner gives us a realistic view of fantasy worlds and blurs our picture of reality. His perspectives vary and so do his layouts--illustrations might fill two pages, or be divided into several sequences of smaller illustrations. Muted beach colors stand out against the brilliant underwater fish. Each picture contributes to the whole story and many hold potential for wondering together.
Wordless books abound. Here are four other recent releases that deserve a second look:
Regis Faller, Polo- The Runaway Book (Roaring Brook, $16.95; ages 4-8)
Barbara Lehman, Rainstorm (Houghton Mifflin, $16.00, ages 4-8)
Sylvia van Ommen, The Surprise (Front Street, $15.95, ages 4-6)
Jennifer Armstrong, Once Upon a Banana, illustrated by David Small (Simon and Schuster, $16.95, ages 5-9)
This year the American Library Association awarded the Printz young adult award to Gene Luen Yang's "American Born Chinese" (First Second, $16.95, ages 13 and up). This should not be a surprise as the graphic novel genre has become such a strong publishing force. Manga, the Japanese graphic novels, are everywhere and traditional comics are finding their way into librarian's collections. Even classics like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys are being translated to graphic novels. Yang's book transported me back to my youth where I spent early allowances on "Archie" comics and survived long car trips with "Classic Comics" like "Silas Marner" and "Huckleberry Finn".
"American Born Chinese" is really three stories in one. It begins with the story of the Monkey King, a figure from one of China's oldest fables. He betters himself by studying Kung-Fu and mastering the prerequisites to immortality. HE mounts a revolution when he's barred from a heavenly dinner party by a guard who tells him "you may be a King- You may even be a Diety- but you are still a monkey." The hero of the second story is Jin, an American-Asian boy with a crush on a white girl in school. The third protagonist is Danny, a boy plagued by his visiting cousin, Chin-Kee, the embodiment of Chinese stereotyping. Chin-Kee bursts on the scene with a "Harro Amellica". This yellow-faced, buck-toothed caricature is happy to see his cousin as "ginger root pranted in nutritious manure of well-bred ox."
All three stories are humorously told with a bent to mock racism and prejudice. For example, the schoolmates of American-born, Jin, are full of typical labels on his first day of school in surburbia. "My momma says Chinese people eat dogs," one student says and the teacher downplays this with, "I'm sure Jin doesn't do that! In fact Jin's family probably stopped that sort of thing as soon as they came to the United States." Jin corrects her, letting her know that though he's got Asian features, he was born in the U.S.
Yang's graphic stories skip around from the disgusting to the sublime, his tongue firmly in his cheek as he illustrates first love, booger-eating, bullying, friendship, and shame. He uses subtle coloring and bolded texts to emphasize his points. As you read you see the connection of all characters who fight their way out of the boxes designed for them by others. The contemporary stories and fable come together in terms of plot and theme as the characters enter each other's stories, revealing and transforming themselves as the tales merge.
Luckily I have to book friends who are addicted to this genre. Karin Michel, children's librarian at the Chapel Hill Public Library, and Ruffin Powell, librarian at Culbreth Middle School, have made me a reading list of their favorites. It follows below should you, like me, want to take a second look at graphic novels.