The Great Outdoors

William Low

Books that prompt children to explore the world around them are rare treasures, and Daytime Nighttime by William Low is one for youngest nature lovers.

With just one word per page (on most pages) and a close-up of the creature named, children begin to make the connection between the picture they see and the living things they find in their own backyards, parks and schoolyards. William Low focuses on one child, so youngsters may follow along with her, as if seeing the butterfly, rabbit or owl through her eyes. And the final scene at bedtime, with the young heroine holding her Teddy bear as the moonlight shines through her window, provides a soothing image before going to sleep.

William Low self-portrait

At this time of year, when the days are less structured, this durable board book acts as a kind of field guide for youngest explorers.

Standing at the Crossroads

Mitali Perkins

Mitali Perkins gives readers a journey to an exotic land in flux in her novel Tiger Boy. The village itself mirrors young Neel's predicament. A developer, Mr. Gupta, has arrived in the Sunderbans of West Bengal, who wishes to exploit its resources, using its sundari trees for his buildings, and pressing the villagers to take the wood from reserves where the trees should be protected.

Then a Bengali tiger cub escapes. Mr. Gupta wants to sell it on the black market, and Neel becomes determined to find it first and return the cub to the rangers. It's a crisis of conscience for Neel because his father has begun working for Mr. Gupta to pay for Neel's mother's medical bills and a tutor so that Neel can win a scholarship to go to Kolkata and study--a path Neel does not wish for himself.

Change is in the air, and Neel is resisting it. His country is at a new stage, just as he is. Perkins exposes the differences accorded to the genders in West Bengal without judgment--it's a way of life that requires a girl to drop out of school to tend to the cooking and washing if her mother becomes ill. Yet the focus remains on Neel's choice to remain in the village he loves or go out into the world and try to bring back his knowledge and experience. The author also exposes the moral crossroads of the villagers--namely Neel's father.

As with her Bamboo People, Perkins smoothly conveys the all-too-brief childhood of young people forced to grow up quickly because of the changing nature of their way of life. She transports readers to faraway places yet endows her characters with problems that feel immediate and universal: the importance of safety, food, clean water, family and community--and standing up for the ideals you hold dear.

The Last of Its Kind

Jean Craighead George

In Galápagos George, Jean Craighead George wrote about the last of the great Pinta Island tortoises of the Galápagos Islands, Lonesome George, who lived for 100 years. Her longtime collaborator, Wendell Minor, in realistic watercolors, illustrates this awe-inspiring creature in a way that makes children empathize deeply with him. Lonesome George was the last of his kind.

Galápagos George won the 2015 Cook Prize, for the best read-aloud STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) title for third- and fourth-graders, voted on by children. Yesterday, at the Irma Simonton Black Award and Cook Prize ceremony at Bank Street College of Education (televised live and archived on KidLit TV), Twig George, the author's daughter, described what it was like growing up with Jean Craighead George. The author did not live to see the book published, but she lived nearly as long as her tortoise hero. She was 92 when she died, three years ago today.

Wendell Minor
Photo: Charlie Craighead

Jean Craighead George wrote more than 120 books. Twig George described her mother as "a force of nature" who "brought the animals she wrote about into the house. Literally into the house." George added, "So we had crows knocking on the window in the morning to come in and have breakfast, and owls sitting on your shoulder in the shower." Twig George said that her mother wanted to put as much information in her books as she could. "She wanted to put kids there, their feet in the sand and their toes in the mud,"Twig George recalled.

At 80 years old, Jean Craighead George traveled to the Galápagos Islands. She was working on her writing until about 4 days before she died, according to Twig George. She was a trailblazer, writing about the environment and nature for children long before anyone else. As Twig George put it in her beautiful afterword to Galápagos George, "Jean Craighead George and Lonesome George passed away within weeks of each other in 2012. They were both one of a kind."

Preschool Preoccupations

Kevin Henkes

Kevin Henkes has tackled such early childhood preoccupations as a new sibling (Julius, the Baby of the World), a new school (Chrysanthemum) and anxieties large and small (Wemberly Worried). In Little White Rabbit, Henkes focuses on a child's curiosity and imagination.

His pastel palette of green and blue, with touches of pink and the occasional browns for a tree trunk or log (plus the gray of a menacing cat), allows little white rabbit to stand out against his surroundings. As he hops along, he imagines himself a part of everything he sees. In the high grass, he wonders what it would be like to be green. Then in a wordless spread, Henkes gives readers a window into little white rabbit's imagination. He is as green as the grasshopper perched on a bending blade of grass. All of the animals are shown in profile, so preschoolers only see one wide eye of each creature. When little white rabbit imagines himself tall, like the fir trees, Henkes depicts the rabbit's pink nose high in the air like the pink birds in flight just above his head; his feet are firmly planted beneath the fir tree, with a host of rabbits near, contrasting actual size with the hero, giant-size.

When little white rabbit hops over a rock and "wondered what it would be like not to be able to move," we can imagine preschoolers imitating the hero and staying stone-still, as little white rabbit imagines himself doing through sun, rain and darkness. One of the most glorious transitions occurs as the rabbit hero imagines "what it would be like to flutter through the air," as butterflies do. Henkes creates markings on the butterflies' wings that echo the pink inside the rabbit's white ears, so when he imagines himself in flight, his ears act as wings, and he appears to be migrating with them.

A moment of tension (the appearance of a cat) causes the hero to hop home "as fast as he could," where a loving mother awaits him ("[H]e didn't wonder who loved him"). How well Henkes knows that as much as little ones want to test their independence, they also want to know that their family is near. With only one line of text per spread (except for the wordless ones), this is a deceptively simple story that will launch a flight of fancy for youngest book lovers.

From 1 to 100

The design of Countablock is as enticing as the text by Christopher Franceschelli and the illustrations by Peskimo. Young children can touch each numeral as they count from 1 to 10 (and then by 10s to 100). They can see that 6 and 8 have curves, and that 4 and 7 are angular. They can begin to recognize the numerals on sight, just as they would sight words such as "the" and "and."

From Countablock

At a time when children are learning at their most rapid rate, they can gain a full experience of seeing, touching and sounding out the names of these numbers as well as counting the objects. The book is beautiful to behold, the text stimulates thinking, guessing and problem-solving, and the pages are chunky enough for little hands to grip and turn, over and over again.

Children will appreciate the book's additional layers as their developmental skills widen and deepen. Author and artists (Peskimo is a husband-and-wife illustrator team) pay homage to both the beauty of the natural world (20 caterpillars that transform into 20 butterflies), and humor (with 40 eggs that include 39 of the more common white or beige variety, but also a large green egg that cracks open to reveal a surprise occupant). There is much to savor in these pages.

Awareness into Action

Paul Fleischman

Paul Fleischman gives young people a different set of tools for improving their world in Eyes Wide Open: Going Behind the Environmental Headlines. He suggests that we first need to be aware of the world around us and how it's changing, evaluate it and, if we have concerns, figure out how to be proactive.

As a poet (and Newbery winner for Joyful Noise), Fleischman has always been a close observer of the world around him and, like many other poets, found inspiration in nature. So when he begins to find dead bees in his driveway with somewhat alarming frequency, he begins to investigate. What was the cause, and what, if anything, could he do to help?

He points interested readers to further resources, organizations and most importantly tools for evaluating information--what is the source of these statistics? Does the writer have an agenda (lobbying group, public relations firm)? These ideas are valuable in any context, but especially if students feel passionately enough to get involved. After they observe a situation and decide they want to help, where can their talents and efforts best be used?

The ideas here apply not just to causes near and dear to readers, but also to how they live their lives.

Connecting to Nature

Interior from You Are My Baby: Garden

When spring arrives, nature's creatures come out. You Are My Baby: Garden by Lorena Siminovich (author and artist of last year's You Are My Baby: Farm) makes an ideal guide for toddlers eager to identify the animals, insects, and arachnids they encounter in the world around them. Naming them forges a connection between a child and the other beings in his or her world.

The thick corrugated pages of this intelligently designed book allow children to leaf through the larger pages featuring the adults or the smaller ones starring their babies nestled in this book-within-a-book, as their matching game expands to include the great outdoors. They begin to connect the creature they see in a tree, a bush, or on a path in the woods to the animals, insects and arachnids they've observed in these pages.

It's a terrific companion for a stroller ride or a drive in the country, to prompt toddlers--even before they can form the words--to point to the page that matches what they see on a branch or a grassy patch.

Less Is More

The simplicity of Nest by Jorey Hurley is astonishing--the spareness of the art, and the economy of language. Just 14 words describe an entire cycle of life, from the building of the nest for a newly laid egg, to that new life maturing, finding a mate and beginning its own family. One word per spread completes the story.

Over the years that I have been in children's books, I have heard many adults cavalierly say that they "have a picture book" they've written. Usually people with little experience reading them to children or studying them to see what makes the successful ones a success and the misfires a misfire. A great picture book is like a fine poem: every word counts.

Interior from Nest by Jorey Hurley

In Nest, all 14 words count. Because Jorey Hurley is also the book's artist, she can choreograph each word's placement on the page, drawing a child's eye to where she wants them to pay the most attention. Many of the words she chooses do double duty, as both noun and verb or adjective and verb. "Nest" is the place the mother and father robin watch over their sky-blue egg; it also describes what they do when they protect their egg. In the spring, "warm" refers to the quality of rain that falls around them and also to the activity of the mother incubating her egg. When the tree where the robins live bears fruit, the fruit provides a "feast"; it's also a word that means to eat, which they do in the illustration.

As a child lives with the book and returns to it for multiple readings, and as his or her experience of the world widens, these double meanings start to become clear, and the book feels new to the child. Children begin to wonder, what other discoveries can I make? What other ideas are here, hidden on the page (who's holding the other end of the kite on the "surprise" page in Nest, for instance)? What other books of mine have these secret revelations awaiting my newfound understanding of the world? That might not be quite how the child would put it, but these are the connections he or she is making. Most importantly, children begin to see that books are a way to unlock life's mysteries.

Love Letter to the Midwest

The Thing about Luck by Cynthia Kadohata, illus. by Julia Kuo, begins as the story of an intergenerational family and transforms into a love letter to the Midwest.

Cynthia Kadohata

Each year, Summer Miyamoto's family hits the road to harvest wheat in the fields of Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma. Usually her parents go with Summer, her brother, Jaz, her Obaachan (grandmother) and Jiichan (grandfather). This time, her parents are in Japan attending to elderly ailing relatives. So Summer's grandparents are in charge. Jiichan operates a combine, which reaps, threshes and winnows the wheat, and Obaachan and Summer prepare the meals for the combine operators. 

Their days are long, but the setting is breathtaking. Here Summer describes the uncut wheat on a gentle slope of the Franklins' Oklahoma farm: "It looked like windblown sand beneath the bright sky." As someone who grew up in Michigan, this reader appreciated the Midwest anew, seeing the landscape through Summer's eyes. Her first-person narrative perfectly captures the rhythms of their days, as determined by daylight, weather and mealtimes.

Summer roots readers in the moment: we see the operators navigate the rolling hills with the unwieldy combines, anticipating every uneven patch, and the precision with which the drivers must align to the grain trailer to empty their load. There is an art to the process unique to its mission, and every step must be executed with absolute precision. Summer's awe inspires our own: "I don't know. I mean, maybe computers and cell phones and rocket ships are more magical, but to me, nothing beats the combine.... In a short time, the combine takes something humans can't use and then turns it into something that can feed us." Julia Kuo's drawings (meant to represent Summer's notebook pages) show each stage of the process with a handful of clear line drawings.

When Summer must, in a moment of crisis (Jiichan falls suddenly ill on the job), drive the combine herself, readers learn just how mammoth these machines are. Throughout, a story unfolds of the toll the work takes on Jiichan, as well as a lighter subplot about Summer's crush on her employers' son. These, too, highlight the cycles of life, as Obaachan and Jiichan share wisdom gained through experience with their granddaughter, whose life is just beginning. And always the land stretches before them, and the descent of night or rain threatens their mission to yield the most wheat that they can from these fields of windblown sand beneath the bright sky. 

Early Steps toward Independence

Robin Page and Steve Jenkins create a model of how to present science for young children with their book My First Day. They start by telling children what they, as newborn babies, did on the first day. They then use the same format to describe what other creatures did on their first day--some achieve more than a human newborn, others even less (the Siberian tiger, for instance, is born with its eyes closed and remains completely dependent on its mother). 

Author and artist pick usually one, often surprising fact about that animal (or bug, in one case). A wood duck, for instance, jumps out of its nest and falls "a long long way" out of its nest into a pond, then paddles after its mother on its first day. Each illustration depicts the adult parent with the newborn, so children can see how the baby will look when it's grown.

Implicit in these snapshots of animals--many of which are independent in certain respects from the start (joining the herd, walking right away)--is that their parents (usually the mother, but in the case of Darwin's frog or the emperor penguin, the father) are never far from them. Jenkins's cut-paper collage in realistic colors and textures follows a similar visual design on the page, and keeps the focus on parent and offspring.

In addition to being an outstanding introduction to science, this book is ideal for starting a conversation about going away for day camp or starting preschool or kindergarten: If a child is feeling any anxieties about leaving home to go solo for part of the day or being in a new environment, his or her worries can bubble up in a safe way, through questions about how the animal parents reunite with their babies. Detailed notes in the back of the book help parents and caregivers answer some of the more probing questions.

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.

Safe and Curious

It is harder than one might think to accomplish what Jerry Pallotta and Shennen Bersani do in Butterfly Colors and Counting. They take a very simple concept--counting and butterflies--and help toddlers feel both safe and curious.

They start with a narrow topic that youngest children can identify readily and feel comfortable with immediately--butterflies. They show colors that children know and actual butterflies that exist in nature, but of an exotic variety that they likely won't have been exposed to yet. (A list of the butterflies' names appears on the back cover, to encourage further inquiry.) The number of butterflies on the page correlates to both the numeral and the number spelled out: "4 four purple" (the butterflies pictured are amethyst hairstreak). By pairing the familiar with the unfamiliar, author and artist invite the child to feel both safe (among butterflies) and curious (What kind of butterfly is that? Where do they live? Why haven't I seen these before?). 

It's a very hard balance to strike and one not often accomplished in books for children this young. Busy Birdies by John Schindel, photos by Steven Holt, and the other board books by Schindel in that series also springs to mind. These are information books that build on what a child knows already and that stretch them to want to learn more.

The Art of Reinvention

Laura Vaccaro Seeger

Let us meditate for a moment on the art of Laura Vaccaro Seeger.  She reinvents the picture book genre, the beginning reader, the alphabet book. She uses die-cut holes to reveal hidden details. In The Hidden Alphabet, in First the Egg, in Green. She makes us take a second look at the things we thought we knew—leaves and trees, sun and moon, snowman and stars. That tree we take for granted was not always there. It took generations to grow. Let us take note of it, she seems to say. Let us stand under its majesty, drink in its shade, rest among its roots.

So let us meditate on the leaves, on the egg, on all the things we miss while going about our daily business. Let us pause and take in the green we take for granted.

Voilà!

Spring is my favorite season. Having grown up in Michigan, we waited patiently, very patiently, for that first golden spray of forsythia to tell us winter was over. And even then we might get another blizzard, crushing those fragile first blossoms. Erin Stead, who illustrated Julie Fogliano’s And Then It’s Spring also grew up in Michigan. Maybe that’s why her visual interpretation of the hero's emotions in Fogliano’s poetic text feels so right and true.

Spring is the season akin to the starlet who’s an “overnight sensation.” No one knows of the years of cold call auditions and being turned away and lining up again. Few but the starlet remember the hard slogging and patient persistence once success arrives. When spring finally bursts into full bloom, we feel we’ve earned it, after all those dark days of endless trudging in high boots through cold snow.

Yet because spring has always come, we trust that it will come again. Like the young gardener in Fogliano's story, we start to see glimmers of “a hopeful, very possible sort of brown” in the same brown ground we’ve stared at for many bleak months. We, too, see a... “is that a little green?/ no, it’s just brown sort of brown,” and then, a week later with still no change, we think the worst. Birds have eaten the seeds, bears have stomped on the seeds. This is my favorite line of the book: “[B]ears can’t read signs/ that say things like/ ‘please do not stomp here--/there are seeds/ and they are trying.' ”

Aren’t we all trying? Just trying to get through these last brown days, however long the brown stays, until the green pokes through. “Please do not stomp here, there are seeds and they are trying!” It’s so much more eloquent than “Stay off the grass.” And while we wait for the seeds to succeed, we can put an old tire to use as a swing or refashion a milk carton as a bird feeder.

And then suddenly a riot of color runs rampant, and cherry blossom trees escort us on our walks up the Hudson River or past the reflecting pool in our nation’s capitol, or in the town square in cities all across America. And we have an overnight sensation: Spring.

Finding the Fireworks

One of things I love most about Marla Frazee’s projects is the way she chooses them. “When I read a book to consider illustrating I don't want to fully understand it. I want to puzzle it out,” says Frazee. “I almost want to be afraid of it.” You can see just what she means when you look at her artwork for Stars by Mary Lyn Ray. The text is poetic and lyrical and closely observed, yet it does not include a set group of characters. Frazee found ways to connect the images and build relationships among characters so that you feel an emotional connection to them.

Frazee spoke at the Society of Illustrators in the same presentation as Stephen Savage (which I mentioned last week). She said the text of Stars reminded her of Ruth Krauss’s A Hole Is to Dig, illustrated by Maurice Sendak. Krauss, a former teacher, once said something along the lines of she hoped her students didn’t sue her for lifting their conversations verbatim and recording them in the book. Stars has that same loose, free-associative quality as Krauss’s book.

If you look at Frazee’s illustrations for All the World by Liz Garton Scanlon, and Everywhere Babies by Susan Meyers, the same is true there, too. Frazee creates the narrative through line with her images. We recognize her characters from certain details—pigtails, a slouchy posture, striped onesies, overalls. Although they go unnamed, we feel as if we know them.

Marla Frazee’s Web site, in addition to showing a picture of her studio under an avocado tree (she's sitting on the porch of her studio with Rocket, above), gives all sorts of insights into her work. At the Society of Illustrators, she talked about how she starts with a series of single images. “Sometimes the way into a book is just that--just a way to get started. Like you tend to have polite conversation and then you click,” she said, adding that you have to give yourself permission to make mistakes.

She talked about painting with a tiny brush. It made me look anew at the spread of the yellow sky with its hundreds of dandelion seeds, and the winter scene veiled by snowflakes (“Of course each one had to be unique,” Frazee said with a laugh). Cecilia Yung, art director at Penguin Books for Young Readers, who helped organize the presentation, made this wonderful observation: “The starring character is the sky.” Going back through Stars after that, I thought about the sky’s many moods, and how it envelops the stars in all its incarnations—as celestial body, as the blossom shape that precedes the pumpkin, and as the shiny kind a child keeps in his pocket or gives to a friend to lift her spirits. And that fireworks finale merges the human- and nature-made creative forces into one. Brava!

Long Winter’s Nap

There are many reasons to read and reread Very Hairy Bear by Alice Schertle, illustrated by Matt Phelan.

True, it conveys the concept of hibernation for very youngest children, as the bear prepares for his long winter’s rest by eating well and then settling into a cozy spot. That also makes this an ideal nap or bedtime book, because the bear is winding down his activities.

But the best part is the wordplay. In the summer, “He eats the berries and the bushes, too. He’s a very full berryfull bear.” Matt Phelan shows a blueberry stuck to the end of each ursine toenail. As squirrels tuck acorns under oak trees, “a no-hair nose knows where to find them.” Long vowel sounds slow the pace, mirroring the bear’s transition to inactivity: soft white snowflakes “cling to bear hair (if there’s a bear there),” the text reads, as the bear becomes camouflaged by snow. The silver salmon the bear pursued in spring now “sleep deep” on the pond’s floor.

One last gasp of humor before the close as the furry fellow “scratches his big brown bear behind,” then settles down to sleep. This brief book accomplishes a lot in a short span, and your youngsters will want it close at hand.

Fathers Know Best

March of the Penguins (2005) is the first film I can think of that informed mass numbers of children about the important role fathers often play in the natural world. They learned that male emperor penguins care for their young while the mothers go out in search of food. Eric Carle’s Mister Seahorse came out before that film (2004), and now it’s newly available in a board book edition. The author-artist is a master of distilling information into its simplest form. Here he exposes an entire undersea community in which fathers care for their unborn offspring.

Mrs. Seahorse lays her eggs in Mr. Seahorse’s pouch, then disappears from the pages. Ever after, it’s Mr. Seahorse protecting his offspring in his pouch while communing with other caretaking fathers in his travels. Mr. Stickleback, a fish, guards the nest he built, where Mrs. Stickleback laid her eggs. Toddlers can see the eggs that Mr. Tilapia keeps in his mouth (therefore he cannot speak but Mr. Seahorse tells us what's happening). Eggs are clearly visible on the belly of the pipefish, Mr. Pipe, and (my favorite), on Mr. Kurtus’s forehead. Transparent “windows” in a few of the board book pages fill in the reeds, coral reefs and seaweed that offer camouflage to other sea creatures. (Eric Carle described how he creates his collage artwork in a recent interview.)

Mister Seahorse is a great way for toddlers to learn about another approach to “child-rearing” in nature, and curious older siblings will scamper off to read more about fascinating creatures such as the Kurtus nurseryfish. It’s a great conversation-starter about the important role both parents play in child-rearing.

Fostering a Kinship with Nature

The Water Hole by Graeme Base is a great way to bring awareness to youngest children about other animals around the globe, their habitats and common needs. I believe that one of the great gifts we can give young people is an appreciation of nature. If we encourage them to explore the natural world with a sense of adventure and also with the sense of peace and tranquility to be found in nature, they will likely become willing to do what they can to take care of their planet.

I don’t believe it’s fair to fill their minds with tales of global warming or disappearing species when there’s so little they can do to help at this age. But if they begin to identify animals, put a name to them, and match them to their natural habitats, they will start to develop an awareness of the other creatures and plants with which they share this glorious planet.

When Jerry Pinkney gave his acceptance speech last month for the 2010 Caldecott Medal for his book The Lion and the Mouse, he said that as a child visiting the zoo in the 1940s, he was troubled by the “dark, musty structures” that held the big cats, pacing their cages with blank stares. His artwork reflects a lifelong love and close study of nature, a passion that he shares with the young readers who open his books and the adults who visit the museums where his fine art is on display.

As children count the animals or pick out the comical frogs on the pages of The Water Hole, and search for the animals hidden in the shadows and tree branches, they will continue to get familiar and comfortable with these creatures. They'll start to recognize the animals the next time they see them in photographs, films, or at the zoo, and may well begin to feel a sense of kinship with them.

Nature: The Key to the Spark Within You

I was 13 when I first visited Walden Pond. It was 1976, the Bicentennial, and my father had a professional conference to attend in Boston. He and my mother decided we would drive from Michigan, making stops in Lexington and Concord, Mass. We visited Louisa May Alcott’s home, where I remember thinking the rooms were so small, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s house where I seem to recall an etching on a downstairs window purportedly made with a diamond, and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s home. It was astounding to me that all of these writers I’d been reading could be so concentrated in one place. But I think stopping at Walden Pond made the biggest impact. To see the land that had inspired so many of Henry David Thoreau’s ideas--to walk where he had walked and planted and harvested--made his journal real.

Thoreau at Walden by John Porcellino impressed me greatly because his graphic novel format captured visually the feeling of setting foot on that land, and what it’s like to be alone beside the water and to smell the earth. His images of the landscape render words unnecessary in many of the sequences of panels, and he gives you room, as readers, to take in what it’s like to stand where Thoreau stood, to see what he saw.

Young people are so in touch with that sensory experience. Right now I’m staying with my seven-year-old nephew, Tiger, for a stretch here in Austin, Texas, and he and his classmates are so connected to the present. We’ve had a series of overcast and rainy days, and at the first sign of sunshine, they’re out the door, riding bikes, zipping on their scooters, playing hide-and-seek among the trees in the park. There’s something about being in nature that makes us more alive, more awake.

That’s what John Porcellino taps into in the quotes and episodes he’s chosen from Thoreau’s journals, and it’s the reason I’ve returned to his book again and again since its publication in 2008. In an interview, Porcellino said he discovered Thoreau in high school, at about the time that he began to experiment with comics. Porcellino said that his advice to young people is to “Find that spark that’s unique to you and express that.” He believes that that is a large part of what we can take from Thoreau’s philosophy, too, as a man who lived differently from his peers in 19th-century New England. Though Thoreau may not have been fully appreciated in his own time, his ideas continue to influence us today.