In a recent post we asked for your local school and library Mock Caldecott lists, and several titles came up that we wanted to add to the Calling Caldecott conversation. Two of these are the subjects for today: Big Bear little chair by Lizi Boyd and The Moon Is Going to Addy’s House by Ida Pearle.
Boyd’s Big Bear little chair was named a NYT Best Illustrated book this year, along with others we’re discussing this fall (A Fine Dessert; The Skunk; Tricky Vic; Leo; Funny Bones). Here’s what the NYT said about Big Bear little chair: “This ingenious take on the ‘opposites’ book shows the youngest children that big, little and tiny are all in how you look at things. Using just black, white and a velvety gray, with a bit of red, Boyd’s delightful cut paper compositions juxtapose the large and the small in unexpected ways: a ‘big meadow’ is big because it’s full of small flowers; a ‘big seal’ towers over a ‘tiny castle’ that’s made of sand.”
It is an opposites book, but it also encompasses the concept of relative size (big, little, and tiny). So it’s clever-clever. And as you can see from the cover, it has a striking shape and an equally striking palette (red, black, white, and gray) with the promise of strong, eye-catching compositions. Each individual page is striking. The art is stylish; so is the book design. The juxtapositions (of large and small) are indeed unexpected. The gouache illustrations are sometimes delicate; sometimes bold; always beautifully composed. It’s easy to see why the judges chose this book for the best illustrated list.
But who is the intended audience? The interspersed bears’ story (in which two bears eventually get matched up with her appropriate chair —and with each other) is clearly for very young readers, but the “opposites” in the intervening pages are sometimes quite sophisticated in concept. See Big Elephant/little trick. “Trick”? That’s an idea, not an object — different from and more advanced than most of the other pairs (Big Moon/little star; etc.). Visually, the use of red is inconsistent. Red almost always spotlights the “little” item on each page, but not always. Crucially, it isn’t used for the first example, where we see a “Big Plant” and a “little cocoon.” On this page the red highlights berries on the plant, not the cocoon. For the rest of the first section, though, and into the next section, red will be used for the “little” item on each page. This wouldn’t be a problem in a book for sophisticated readers, but — see the young-ish interspersed bear-chair story…
The Moon Is Going to Addy’s House is not your typical, sleepy looking-at-the-moon story. This is, rather, an ecstatic, intoxicating experience: a bacchanal for the picture-book set. In tour-de-force cut-paper collages, Pearle uses a controlled riot of vivid colors and patterns to evoke intensity and emotion. The text is much less emotional; all the feeling here is in the illustrations.
The Kirkus review said that the book is “exquisite, electrifying, soothing, and soporific, brilliant in color”; that the landscapes “throb with vitality.” The use of bright pink and deep purple is unusual and intense. Some of the double-page spreads take one’s breath away with their sheer beauty: such as the one where a striated purple sky and pink moon above and their reflection below (in a body of water) are separated by a thin stretch of dark-brown road. Other illustrations capture that universal human sense of connection with the moon: such as the one in which the girl sees the moon reflected in the car’s rear-view mirror and feels as if she could catch it in her hand (echoes of Thurber’s Many Moons?).
But in some illustrations, it’s difficult to know where to look; and although the way the moon sometimes seems to jump around in the sky may be realistic, it can be disconcerting. The book’s horizontal shape sometimes works in its favor (as in the gorgeous spread mentioned above) and sometimes to its disadvantage: see the “Look way up high / and way down low” spread, where the “high” and “low” aren’t that different.
So. Will the Real Committee have these two (very beautiful) books on its radar? Do you?
The post Mock Caldecott Catch-up, part 1 appeared first on The Horn Book.
