On Friday I finally made it up to Newcastle to catch the National Centre for Children’s Books, Seven Stories’ exhibition Painting with Rainbows – A Michael Foreman Exhibition, which closes today (sorry!). The good news is that it will be heading out on tour: so far, it’s … Continue reading ...
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By: Aline Pereira,
on 9/18/2011
Michael Foreman,
Mia’s Story: A Sketchbook of Hopes and Dreams
Candlewick Press, 2006.
Ages 4-8
British author-illustrator Michael Foreman was traveling in Chile when he encountered the family on whom he based Mia’s Story. Mia lives in a “village” between Santiago and the snow-capped Andean mountains she can see in the distance. Her village has a name, but really it is a community of poor people built up on the edge of a vast trash dump, which they scour for anything they can fix and re-sell in the city. Foreman’s appealing illustrations intersperse full-page paintings and conventional text with smaller sketches accompanied by handwritten-looking text, like scrapbook entries.
Mia isn’t the poorest of the poor; she lives in a house, albeit one roofed in tin scraps, and most important, she has both her parents. Her father has a truck, and she goes to school. There is even a horse, Sancho, and eventually a puppy, Poco, who provides the plot structure for Foreman’s story. When he goes missing, Mia, wearing the traditional poncho and ear-muffed cap of Andean people, mounts Sancho and goes off looking for her dog. Gradually they climb higher and higher. “From up there she could look down on the dark cloud that always filled the valley.”
Things look scary for a moment, but when Mia and even Sancho realize that the air is clean and the snow is irresistible, they both have a good roll in it. “The sky had never been so blue and so near.” Mia doesn’t find Poco, but she does discover a field of white flowers and returns home with a clump, “roots and all,” that she plants near her house.
By the next spring, those flowers have spread into a field that provides a new source of livelihood for Mia and her family. Mia tells her city customers that the flowers “come from the stars.” She still remembers Poco, especially when packs of dogs run by the cathedral, where she sells her flowers. Happily, by the end of the story, there is a dog in Mia’s life again.
On the back flyleaf, Foreman explains that Mia’s Story was inspired by people for whom “trash was a crop to be harvested, recycled, and made useful once more.” His book subtly introduces young children to a sophisticated ecological concept through a delightful story.
Charlotte Richardson
September 2011
