Exuberance

Mary Murphy

When we think of Mary Murphy's books, the word exuberance leaps to mind. Say Hello Like This!, her most recent book for toddlers, emits joy.

As with her I Kissed the Baby!, readers want to follow in line with her characters. She makes you want to kiss a baby and to say hello to every living creature. In Hello Like This!, the animals' joy and playfulness are infectious, from the "licky and loud" dogs ("bow-wow-wow-wow!") to the "silly and happy" hello of the straw-hatted donkeys ("Hee-haw! Hee-haw!"). Delicious sounds teach toddlers new words. They will soon be saying "flappy and clucky" to describe a chicken and "jumpy and croaky" when they spot a frog.

Half-page flaps--thick and durable enough for little hands to hold and turn again and again--chart the creatures' transitions from still and stationary to bursting with excitement and movement. Frogs sitting and gazing at each other from their respective lily pads, with a turn of the page, leap into the air while exclaiming, "croakety croak"! A pair of cats greet each other with a more refined paw-to-paw "purrrrrr... meow."

Murphy's artwork, with its bold outlines and colors, pull young eyes into the pages, searching for hidden details, such as a pair of birds or mice that observe the action. Children will soak up every detail and exclaim, "Again! Again!"

Visual Literacy

Mary Murphy's (I Kissed the Baby!) latest board book, Quick Duck!, attests to why her storytelling is ideally suited to this format. She repeats the title phrase, then lets youngest book lovers know--in just a few words and brush strokes--where the duckling is on the path to (as we soon discover) his or her family.

Last weekend, at the Bank Street College of Education, the Center for Children's Literature (where I serve as interim director) hosted its first Writers Lab mini-conference, "Early Childhood Literature: What Do You Need to Know?" Laura Vaccaro Seeger delivered the closing keynote, and focused on visual literacy. "At some point, we stop seeing things the way a young child does," Seeger said. We stop noticing things. Seeger skillfully uses die-cut pages in many of her books to draw the eye to specific details--books such as The Hidden Alphabet, and her two Caldecott Honor books, First the Egg and Green. With a turn of the page, we continue to notice those details within the context of a larger picture. She teaches us how to see, to notice, all over again.

Seeger also talked about a game she played with her boys when they were little: "How little can I show and still convey an expression of surprise?" Is it the eyes, the mouth? This game later became the basis for her book Walter Was Worried.

Like Seeger, Murphy understands the importance of conveying only the essential details. She keeps the pages clean and the focus on her duck, with its thick black outline against a pastel, mostly white background. A thin green line makes a reed; a thick purple stroke transforms it into a cat tail. The path of muddy webbed footprints betray a sense of urgency and also tell us that the feathered hero knows just where to go ("Out of the mud!"; "Under the hedge!"; "Over the stones!") to arrive safely to a waiting mother and siblings.