This is a hard post to write. I love Peter Sis’s work, and his latest book, The Pilot and the Little Prince, is getting lots of starred reviews, but I’m having trouble jumping on that bandwagon.
Most of my issues with this book wouldn’t fly in a real Caldecott committee discussion. The art is gorgeous and thought-provoking, but I don’t love the text. As you know, the committee is only allowed to compare books to other titles published the same year. This one might stack up well against other 2014 picture book biographies, but I just don’t think it’s as good as Sis’s previous books.
Let me get the non-valid stuff over with in this paragraph so we can get on to what the committee would be talking about. The Pilot and the Little Prince follows a format very similar to The Tree of Life, Sis’s biography of Charles Darwin. But Tree had a clear reason for its three distinct narrative threads and provided insight into what made Darwin tick. Pilot‘s structure is less clear and doesn’t go into much detail about who Saint-Exupery was on the inside. Given the title of this book, I was hoping to learn more about what led to his writing the extraordinary and mysterious Little Prince. Instead, I don’t feel as if I know Sis’s subject any better than I did after reading Saint-Exupery’s Wikipedia entry.
Phew, that’s done.
What the committee CAN discuss about this book is the art and how it works as a whole with the rest of the book’s elements. Sis never takes the easy path. His pointillist style allows him to include myriad small details and references. As a designer, I know how hard it is to put so many images and ideas together on one spread and end up with something balanced and harmonious rather than busy and dissonant.
For example, look at the first spread in the book. We see two small circles showing young Antoine: on the left he is in bed being read to by his mother and on the right he’s a bit older reading by himself. Surrounding these circles we see what he imagines as he absorbs these stories. How do we know that’s what we are seeing? The text doesn’t tell us that the central circles are fact and the surroundings are imagination. It reads, “It was an exciting time of discovery in the world. Things people had only dreamed about were being invented — including flying machines.”
There is a LOT going on in this spread, but the circles showing Antoine use cool colors surrounded with a nearly white background, egg-like. Everything else is warm: red, orange, yellow. There is so much to look at here. I see references to works by Jules Verne and early filmmaker George Melies, both active at the time of Saint-Exupery’s birth and likely to have fueled young Antoine’s interest in flying. There are lots of other references that undoubtedly mean something. I understand the elephant under the hat (from The Little Prince, of course), and Icarus, and the Pterodactyl. But what about the big face in the center that seems to be part of the land? It’s repeated later in a wordless spread after Antoine has started to fly. What does it mean? I like that this book is smarter than I am. There are so many reasons to keep looking and thinking.
I love nearly every visual choice Sis makes in this book. I would love to hear your theories about one choice that I don’t understand. Early in the book, Sis uses negative space to illustrate people in Saint-Exupery’s life who have died. We see his father, who died when he was four, as a white silhouette against a stark landscape and later see his brother and sister, who died in 1917 and 1926, the same way. So what does it mean when Saint-Exupery is shown as a large white silhouette against a map of Paris? Is this foreshadowing? But why on this particular spread? Or is it just a way of designing this spread that doesn’t have anything to do with the visual language he set up earlier?
I think the real committee is likely to spend a lot of time discussing this book. As it should. And as we should right now.
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