DRAWING FROM MEMORY

DRAWING FROM MEMORY         

by Allen Say

Oregon Book Awards, 2013, Children’s Category

The jacket cover of writer illustrator Allen Say’s DRAWING FROM MEMORY depicts twelve-year-old Say floating in his new apartment. In post World War II Tokyo, he has just passed tough middle school entrance exams and his mother has allowed him to be an independent scholar. But Say is not floating with happiness because he can study. He is ecstatic because he now has an art studio. All he has ever wanted to do is draw, to become a cartoonist like Japan’s famous Noro Shinpei, a pioneer of today’s Manga.

This memoir, presented in graphic novel style, is based on Say’s autobiographical novel, The Ink-Keeper’s Apprentice. It’s an extraordinary story of how a young boy realized his dream through perseverance and the good fortune of studying with his hero. Alan Say started his apprenticeship filling in the cartoon backgrounds, inking in clothing and preparing tea for his sensei, his teacher. His middle school art teacher introduced Say to a former student who was a serious artist. Orito-san became another mentor and encouraged Say to draw classical forms.

Later, Shinpei sent Say to life drawing class, saying, “Drawing is never a practice. To draw is to see and discover. Every time you draw, you discover something new.”  Another time he said, “Painting is a kind of writing, and writing is a kind of painting they are both about seeing.”

DRAWING FROM MEMORY is filled with sketches, illustrations, family photos and even Shinpei’s cartoons. I love books set in Japan and after reading this book, The Ink-Keeper’s Apprentice, Grandfather’s Journey and The Bicycle Man, I will seek out Allen Say’s other picture books. 

Listen to Reading Rockets’wonderful interview with Allen Say talking about his career. There he says his idea of imagination is “rearranging your memory.”

Award-Winning Book Challenge Status: 5/11

Award Winning Books - Review of ONE COOL FRIEND

One Cool Friend  by Toni Buzzeo

Illustrated by David Small

Dial Books for Young Readers, 2012

New York Times Best Seller

2013 Caldecott Honor Book

2013 ALA Notable Children’s Book

Dolly Parton Imagination Library Selection

One Cool Friend is a delight, pure and simple. But there is nothing simplistic about the picture book magic created in this perfect marriage of text and art. The concept of communication is key to the story, and it’s the underlying conversation that doesn’t quite make it onto the page that creates a satisfying joke.

Young Elliot is a most polite and proper child. He refrains from saying what he actually means – I’d rather read at home by myself than visit a noisy, crowded aquarium, Dad – and takes to heart his Dad’s instruction to “have fun” at the aquarium. When Elliot asks for a penguin, again he doesn’t quite communicate what he is really thinking. Picture a wading pool turned ice rink in an air conditioned bedroom to keep Elliot’s new pet happy.

Buzzeo’s masterful skill with the text gives readers just what they need to know one page spread at a time. Of course, it’s all hilarious for kids because Caldecott medalist David Small’s pictures show them what’s going on, even if Elliot’s dad seems clueless. It’s the twist ending that sends adults back to the beginning to see what they missed.

When you re-read to absorb the story all over again, take your time and savor the nuances in both text and art. Your young reader friend will be begging you to read it again, anyway. One Cool Friend is a keeper. That’s why it wears a Caldecott Honor seal.

Visit Toni Buzzeo’s website to learn about this talented and prolific author. Check out David Small’s website for a look at the over forty picture books he has illustrated and an online sketchbook.

 After reading One Cool Friend, travel over to Jules' terrific blog Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast for a wonderful look at the evolution/development of David Small's sketches for this book.

Award-Winning Book Challenge Status: 2/11

BookSpeak!

BookSpeak! Poems About Books by Laura Purdie Salas
Illustrated by Josée Bisaillon

Clarion Books, 2011

2012 Gilette Burgess Honor Book

Nerdy Book Award

Book Speak is a whimsical collection of poems that allow books to speak. Characters plead to be set free, the Index makes a case for its superiority, the Bookplate and Book cover have their say, and even the book’s Middle gets to whine.

Books go on vacation when they’re checked out from the library.

I’ve floated in airplanes. I’ve lain on the beach.
I’ve hidden in bunk beds—just out of your reach.

They have a party when the bookstore closes for the night.

The sweetest verse closes the poem structured like “The House That Jack Built”:

And she is the reader
who browses the shelf
and looks for new worlds
but finds herself.

Visit Laura Purdie Salas’s website to read sample poems and also some wonderful essays on poem-making.

Award-Winning Book Challenge Status: 5/11

Poetry Friday

Requiem: Poems of the Terezin Ghetto
by Paul B. Janeczko

I haven't posted on Poetry Friday for awhile, though I've been dipping into the offerings. Today I’m highlighting Paul Janeczko’s award winning book as part of Gathering Books Award-Winning Book Challenge. In a time when the very reality of the Holocaust is challenged by some, Requiem: Poems of the Terezín Ghetto is an important addition to Holocaust literature.

During the Holocaust, the walled city of Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia became a ghetto for Jews transported from Prague and other cities. It was a way station to the gas chambers. This collection of poems gives voices to those who survived the death camp and those who did not. Appropriate for high school, the poems are sensitive, moving and also graphic.

For sixteen years of Fridays, Tomasz Kassewitz met his friend in the park to play chess. One Friday, Willi appeared with his usual peppermints.

“I can no longer play with you,”
said a false voice.
The sun is blue
would have made as much sense.
“It is forbidden, my friend,
to fraternize with a Jew.”

Hear Janeczko read the entire poem.

The Nazis transported intellectuals, artists and musicians to Terezin. Anna Teller says they knew the concerts they were allowed to play in the camp could be their last performance

but we played nonetheless
played as only the brokenhearted can play
a final performance
for it was always a final performance
for some in the orchestra.

Josefine Rabsky names the friends she lost on transport after transport. Then it was her turn. Transport 9177.

Wilfried Becker played violin waltzes for Eva and Otto during their last two hours alone. Eva had traded bread for time behind the curtain of someone else’s alcove.

Requiem is illustrated with sketches by Terezin’s inmates found after the war. It is a haunting book.

Visit Paul Janeczko’s website.

An account of the history of Terezín is here.

Head over to A Year of Reading where Mary Lee hosts Poetry Friday.

Notable Book for a Global Society, 2011

Winner of 2011 Cybils Award for Poetry

Association of Jewish Libraries, Notable Books for Teens, 2012

Award-Winning Book Challenge Status: 4/11

Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu

Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu
Walden Pond Press, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, 2011

Publishers Weekly Book of the Year
School Library Journal Book of the Year

The title Breadcrumbs conjures up an image of Hansel and Gretel trudging off into the forest sprinkling a trail of breadcrumbs behind them. The reader expects a fairytale world, but Hazel, the main character, is in a snowy world full of the reality divorced parents and a teacher with no appreciation for Hazel’s imagination. Only her best friend Jack, whose mother shows signs of mental illness, understands her. And then he stops talking to her. And then he disappears.

It snowed right before Jack stopped talking to Hazel, fluffy white flakes big enough to show their crystal architecture, like perfect geometric poems.

This blend of realistic fiction and fantasy for middle grade readers started off slowly for me. I had just geared up for Hazel’s third person point of view when a distinct narrator voice intruded in Chapter 5. The narrator’s voice, sometimes flat, returns throughout to show events happening in the fantasy world.

Mal is a goblin. He has green-brown skin, a froglike mouth, and sharp little teeth. Mal is a troll. He is seven feet tall and warty, has terrible breath, and a penchant for hanging out under bridges. Mal is an imp. He has small bat wings a high-pitched screech of a laugh, and pointy little ears. Mal is a demon. And that means he is up to no good.

Ursu’s prose is also poetic at times so perhaps she used this technique to differentiate between characters’ and narrator voices. However, the shift was jarring for me perhaps because it went on for whole chapters. Maybe I relate better to a benevolent narrator like the one in The Tale of Despereaux.

Something else that jarred me were the multiple references to the giants of children’s literature that popped up—Wrinkle in Time, The Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter, The Golden Compass. There’s talk of tessering and Dementors. I think I am missing a deep connection here (author Gary Schmidt says the stories “point the way toward understanding and acceptance of loss and sorrow and change, and shout to us of hope and friendship and love.”), but it felt rather heavy-handed. I didn’t need so many signposts to direct me to fantasyland. Hazel and Jack’s knowledge of Narnia and the Snow Queen were sufficient.

In Part Two, the story turns. Hazel does what she must do to save Jack from the Snow Queen. She ventures into the world of fantasy and step by ill-fated step, the reader follows into a land where Hazel learns to trusts wolves and avoid the woodsman.

Hazel had read enough books to know that a line like this one is the line down which your life breaks in two. And you have to think very carefully about whether you want to cross it, because once you do it’s very hard to get back to the world you left behind….
But sometimes you have a friend to rescue. And so you take a deep breath and then step over the line and into the darkness ahead.

Hazel carries a talisman with her, something dear to Jack, and it helps her save her friend. Whether she saves him from the Snow Queen or from his own depression caused by his mother’s mental illness doesn’t matter. What matters is that Hazel, whose own life was in turmoil, stood by a friend in need just like her friend Adelaide’s uncle advised:

So if someone’s changed overnight—by witch curse or poison apple or were–turtle—you have to show them what’s good. You show them love. That works a surprising amount of the time.

Despite my reservations about voice and multiple fantasy references, I did enjoy reading Breadcrumbs and recommend it as an important book about friendship. For those fantasy lovers who never open realistic fiction, Breadcrumbs is a bridge.

Read Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen in Seven Stories here. Ursu has cleverly woven these elements into Breadcrumbs.


Visit Anne Ursu’s website.


Award-Winning Book Challenge Status: 3/11