Visual Grammar

Alison Jay has always created a visual story line in her books, and her beachside adventure Out of the Blue follows that established pattern. Her alphabet book (A B C) and counting book (1 2 3) teach youngest children these early concepts, and they also give them a plot line to follow that unfolds entirely through the illustrations. Out of the Blue, with no words, tells a complete story--two children make friends, take shelter from a storm, and rescue a giant octopus. It's liberating for children who are just learning to read because they can make up their own story.

Jay helps youngest children build confidence, as she reinforces all that they know: pages move from left to right, children can point out the heroes in the book who appear repeatedly (the boy and the girl) and they can follow the secondary characters down the beach. They do not need to decode words to "read" the story.

This spring at the Bank Street College of Education, Stephen Savage spoke about “visual grammar” using his book Where’s Walrus? to explain his idea. He spoke of the text and illustrations as “the harmony and melody of the song” and pointed to silent movies as “the original wordless books.” He explained the four components he believes are essential to books without words:

1)  The close-up
2)  Color/contrast
3)  Design/branding
4)  Pattern/repetition

You can see these elements most clearly in Where's Walrus?, but they also come into play in Alison Jay's work.

Children take in everything around them. They are sponges, absorbing how the world works long before they have words to explain what they're seeing. These elements, of which Savage spoke so eloquently, and which Jay also employs in her books, help children unlock the story within the book and also to use those strategies to make sense of the events in their own experiences.

Music Feeds the Soul

Sandra Boynton

One of the great things in life is watching a child fall in love with a song. When that happens, nothing else exists. The child instinctively starts moving to the beat and singing whatever he or she thinks the words are. Sandra Boynton's Frog Trouble gives children a songbook filled with likely candidates for a lovefest, and it includes the words so they can sing along with the CD with confidence, and with her signature animal characters to amplify the fun. 

What child wouldn't fall for Dwight Yoakam's ballad of a dog named Hank ("I've Got a Dog"), who howls to his crooner-owner's "lonesome song" and doesn't come when he's called, yet sticks by his human's side. A plucked string imitates a canine whining sound, and the spoons performed by Peter and Gordon Scott evoke the do-si-do of the best friends' dance. The Fountains of Wayne extol the virtues of "big trucks and little trucks and long trucks and tall," for "delivery or long-haul." A "downshift" in "Trucks" lowers the key for the singers, while a command to "throw it into fifth" leads to a modulation up. In the songbook, a pig in shades sits at the wheel of a red pick-up filled to capacity with apples. Later in the songbook/album, more than a dozen of Boynton's porkers star in Ryan Adams' wistful interpretation of "When Pigs Fly." 

Boynton and Ford vary tempos and tones beautifully. They follow up the soulful "Heartache Song," performed by Kacey Musgraves, and "When Pigs Fly" with a honky-tonk tune called "Broken Piano" (sung by Ben Folds) and the hilarious "Copycat," for which kids will attempt to keep pace with lead singer Brad Paisley trying to shake off the relentless feline chorus sporting identical hats and green guitars. For children who love to dance with partners, Boynton includes the choreography for "The Alligator Stroll" (a chicken crashes the reptiles' line dance).

In Boynton's equivalent of liner notes, which adults--especially teachers and musicians--and aspiring young singers and guitarists will regard as a treasured process log, she reveals that Alison Krauss was the first artist they signed to the project, for the elegant "End of a Summer Storm." The musicians' stellar work on this selection led Boynton and Ford to request that they play the entire album. With the variety of voices, moods and rhythms, these musicians provide the through line, along with Boynton's playful illustrations and design. You may also enjoy Boynton's TEDx Talk about working on the album.

Blind Spot

Stephan Pastis at the Bank Street School for Children in NY.

We got to talk to Stephan Pastis about his inspiration for Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made. He calls Timmy a boy with a "blind spot." 

You are a comics artist. What have comics taught you about pacing a scene and character development?
Comics is all about pacing. I literally control the shutter of a camera. I give you four panels and each operates as a beat. You have to strip away everything that's extraneous. Comics teach you to be very direct. You have to be able to describe each of your characters in one word. Mean. Dumb. Smart.

Describe Timmy Failure in one word.
I see Timmy as an example of a blind spot. I need two words: arrogant and dumb. He was built entirely around the notion that a blind spot is what makes a character compelling. He sees himself one way, and the rest of the world sees him another way. Confederacy of Dunces was my model: Ignatius Reilly.

But Timmy is also very sympathetic.
In at least one aspect of our lives, we see ourselves in one way and the rest of the world sees us as another. We all lie to ourselves to some extent. In that way, Timmy is relatable. If you see Total [his polar bear sidekick] as a figment of his imagination, that's a measure of how alone he is. I think people respond to that. Despite his arrogance and pomposity, he is sort of sympathetic.

How did Total evolve?
I knew Timmy needed a partner, and I wanted it to be an animal because animals are fun for me. Timmy doesn't have a dad, and the polar bear is large and therefore subliminally protective; soft, so subliminally comforting. Then I thought it would be fun to have an animal who's just a polar bear, as opposed to the anthropomorphic animals in my strip. Timmy takes Total as much more, as a partner, as secretary, as filer, and he's terrible because he's just a bear. Without Total, there's no Timmy. The question I've heard the most is whether he's real, and I think that's a fascinating question. I like people to see it if they want to see it.

How did you come up with Timmy's voice?
His voice is really just mine. Timmy has a lot of me in him. A little bit arrogant, a big dreamer, but not that great at anything. A little bit oblivious. He shares a lot with the characters in the strip. I probably only have one voice, and that's it. Someone who's dumb but thought himself smart. I just write and what comes out, comes out. I have to figure out logically what I created instinctively.

Tell us how you met Charles Schulz.
I was a lawyer in San Francisco, and I was burned out. I read in a weekly newspaper that Charles Schulz had breakfast every day in the same place. I got in my car and drove for an hour to Santa Rosa to this diner, near an ice rink, and watched the skaters. I just waited and waited, and about an hour later, I see a man with white hair walk in, and I knew it was him. This was huge for me. I watched him eat his breakfast. He finally finishes, and I get up my courage and kneel down at the side of the table. I said, "I'm Stephan Pastis and I'm an attorney." I saw him withdraw immediately. I caught myself and told him I was a cartoonist, and that changed everything.

He talked to me for an hour. He asked if I had my drawings with me. They were in the car, and I showed them to him. He said nice things. He gave me some tips about changing the pen I used. How often do you get to meet your hero? The last 60 years of cartooning stems directly from Peanuts. He was to cartooning what Brando was to acting. Brando had a new style of acting, the Method. It changed acting forever. That's what Schulz did in cartooning--the timing, the dryness, the melancholy--that all comes from Peanuts.

This interview was adapted from a longer article in Shelf Awareness for Readers.

Unconditional Love

When it comes to unconditional love, there is no better teacher than a pet--both for giving and for receiving love. In Charley's First Night, when Charley the pup wants Henry the boy to take him home, a lifelong lesson begins.

"This is home, Charley," the boy tells his new pup after a tour. Helen Oxenbury's image of Henry staring into his pup's face, and Charley's vulnerable four-legged body language make clear that each is the only one for the other. In a pitch-perfect scene that blends humor and poignancy, Henry prepares Charley's bed for the night. His parents have been "pretty clear" that Charley must sleep in the kitchen. So Henry places a big comfy pillow under the table, along with his Teddy bear Bobo next to Charley--stuffed bear and dog's bellies bared irresistibly--and a clock between them: "tick-tock-tick-tock--like another little heartbeat in the night."

Even youngest readers will predict that neither boy nor dog can make it through the night alone. "The crying started in the middle of the night and you knew right away it was Charley," Henry says. His feet do not even touch the ground as he runs to his dog, just the way a parent would with a crying newborn. Youngsters will feel that palpable pull. 

Henry breaks the "pretty clear" rule, but who can deny his sense of responsibility? His indisputable, irrefutable love for this dog?  A closing image shows the reflection of an understanding mom in the mirror on Henry's bureau.

Modeling Friendship

Is it possible to model friendship for toddlers, to show examples of how to be a good friend? Jane Cowen-Fletcher's Baby Be Kind suggests the answer is, "Yes." 

Through a series of interconnected scenes between two toddlers, the author-artist depicts a strong friendship (and also how to treat one's pup well). The concept of sharing can be hard for littlest ones. They've just gained a sense of what it's like to have and to hold a toy, a Teddy bear, a graham cracker, and now they're being asked to let someone else play with their toys and share their snack.

The concept is a hard one to teach: You share your toy and then you get another turn. But they only know the here and now. The concept of "soon" is alien. But in these 18 pages, this terrific board book models what it's like to share, to take turns and other ways to be a good friend: how to help a friend up when he falls, to thank her, how to "say you're sorry when you are." 

At a time when toddlers are learning so much, here's a book of gentle humor and life lessons that could well serve them throughout their lives. 

A Time of Transition

When you look back on your childhood, doesn’t it seem as if summer was always a time of momentous changes? Your first time away from home? Winning a tennis tournament? A first romance?

Drew Robin Sole is 13 years old during the pivotal summer when she begins to think of herself and her world differently. The Summer I Learned to Fly by Dana Reinhardt unfolds like a poem, from Drew’s no-nonsense point of view. Except that she begins to indulge in a bit of nonsense—like riding a bike without a helmet and sneaking out of the house when she’s grounded. She also finds herself arguing with her mother, and she can’t figure out quite how it happens. She loves her mother. Yet Drew also needs to test out her own ideas about how things work.

And then there's Emmett Crane, who eats the cheese she leaves on the dumpster behind her mother's Cheese Shop, and shows her things and people in her community she never knew existed. This is not a romance, though maybe there are feelings stirring there. Mostly it’s the story of a boy and girl building a tenuous trust that blossoms into friendship—with a few missteps along the way.

Almost everyone in the book is in transition in some way—Drew’s mother; Nick, a handsome employee in her mother’s cheese shop; Emmett and the friends to whom he introduces Drew. And each touches Drew in ways large and small that ripple through her. By summer’s end, she emerges as a bigger person with richer life experiences for having tested her wings.