New Books: Night Knight

It's long been a reliable trope of picture book to switch back and forth between the reality of a child's world and how that child's imagination is perceiving and transforming that reality. Where the Wild Things Are leaps to mind, of course, but the most gifted of our modern illustrators are also doing great things with the concept, from the stripped-down simplicity of Antonia Portis's Not a Stick to the fabulous controlled chaos of Suzy Lee's Shadow.

British illustrator Owen Davey's Night Knight, like Sendak's classic, leads off with reality but soon (in fact, sooner, in this case) lets imagination take over. A boy in pajamas with a colander on his head informs us that his nightly bedtime ritual is "a great adventure"—and then, on the next page, transforms into a boy knight, complete with chain mail and helmet. The boy is right: His trip down the hallway on a white horse takes him past an inconspicuous telephone table and umbrella stand and through a leafy forest; his bath explodes with colorful fish and crabs (and a giant bath plug); his "climb into bed" involves a tall tower and a ladder.

The author cleverly slips an element or two of the boy's reality--the mundane hallway furniture, the bath plug, the dog collar on the boy's pet three-headed dragon to whom he says good night—into each step of the process. But to concentrate too much on that would be to make too little of the book's most truly wondrous aspect: Davey's resplendent, vivacious illustrations of the imaginary stuff. This is an illustrator whose panels will make adults gasp. They'll also keep young children coming back to Night Knight night after, well, night.

[Cover image courtesy of Candlewick Press]

2010 Wrap: Books, Part 1

I wrote about most of my favorite kids' books of 2010 in individual posts during the year, of course, and especially in this category, a true "best of" list would for the most part just echo those posts directly. So instead, I'm going to mention some of the trends I saw during the year in my and my kids' reading, which will allow me to give nods to both books I've covered in the blog and ones I've missed or not gotten around to yet.

And since I haven't been posting nearly as often as I'd like of late, and this post will probably get long enough that writing it will put things off another few days otherwise, I'm also going to break it up into multiple posts.

So, first off: As has been common in recent years, many of the most brilliant and revelatory picture books of the year were either nearly or entirely wordless. In some cases, the focus on image and imagination was the explicit point (David Wiesner's Art & Max, Suzy Lee's Shadow); in others, it was just a remarkably effective way of telling the story (Elisha Cooper's Beaver Is Lost and even his somewhat wordier Farm; Bill Thomson's Chalk; Lane Smith's It's a Book). All of them demonstrate one of the lessons Pixar—and Charlie Chaplin, for that matter—have been teaching creators of kids' entertainment for years now: Sometimes, a great idea told entirely through images is the best storytelling there is.

Tomorrow: What Rick Riordan hath wrought.

[Images courtesy of Chronicle Books (Shadow) and Macmillan (It's a Book)]

New Books: Shadow

It’s a little strange, given that I’m a words person both personally and professionally, that some of my very favorite children’s picture books in recent years have been wordless, or nearly so. Last year, it was Jerry Pinckney’s resplendent The Lion and the Mouse that I was flipping over (since it ended up winning the Caldecott, I guess I wasn’t alone!). And I recently encountered its equivalent for 2010: Shadow, by Suzy Lee.

In a way, this shouldn’t be so surprising, since the first picture book I read by this South Korean–born author-illustrator was one of the highlights of my four years covering children’s books at Cookie magazine. Wave, a word-free narrative of a little girl’s encounter with the ocean, demonstrated Lee’s immense talent not just as an artist but as a storyteller. The book is downright cinematic, as clever and funny and smart as great silent films, and all the parents and kids I knew fell in love with it instantly.

In Shadow, Lee uses the same basic framework—again, the story is told through progressive illustrative variation on one basic idea. But while both titles are, at root, about playful imagination, this one has a very different, and perhaps even more ideal, setting. The book, which you read turned on its side horizontally (in other words, each page has “landscape” orientation), begins with a little girl switching on the light in a cluttered attic. You see the typical contents of such a space (a ladder, old boots, a hanging bicycle, a broom, a vacuum cleaner) above the fold, and below it, the shadows cast by each object, all rendered in charming black-and-white charcoal-and-pencil drawings.

On the next spread, the girl sees the shadows and begins to play—and her imagination starts to take hold of what we see right away. While the shading at the bottom half continues to reflect what she’s literally doing above at first—making a bird shadow with her hands, say—the dark shapes quickly start to morph on their own, the broom and ladder becoming jungle flowers and vegetation, the bicycle wheels a couple of moons, the vacuum cleaner an elephant, and so on.

Soon the “real” world above the fold starts to disappear, leaving only the girl herself, while the shadow world of play correspondingly fills out more and more, takes on color, and eventually invades and takes over both halves of each spread. The girl joins and interacts with her mind’s creations, the scene becoming more and more jubilant and wild, until the book’s only words—“Dinner’s ready!”—interrupt.

The pages immediately flash back to attic and shadows, respectively (with most of the attic’s contents in the top half in different places than they were before, and in even greater disarray). The girl clicks off the light, and there’s one black spread of complete darkness—before another click. At the end, we see the shadow creatures of the girl’s imagination—and the girl’s shadow too!—still dancing on the bottom half of the last spread.

My description doesn’t do it all justice, but maybe this will: The first time you read the book, if you’re anything like me, you will be turning each page in open-mouthed astonishment at the simple sophistication of what Lee is doing. And by the book’s end, you will be unable to repress a gigantic grin at what you’ve just experienced. Shadow is marvelous, the best picture book I’ve seen this year. And I can’t wait to see what Lee’s fertile mind and agile hand will turn to next.

[Photos: Whitney Webster]