This impressive picture book combines the little known true and tragic story of a Japanese poet, Misuzu Kaneko with her own poems presented bilingually, inlaid on unmistakably Japanese art. It's not a picture book for tiny little children, but like the last two books I've written about this week this is a book that shows depth. It tackles difficult topics in ways that are respectful of children's intelligence and yet gentle enough to allow space for thoughtful conversation.

The book starts with the story of the young poet who had read one of Misuzu Kaneko's poems and set out on a quest to find her. The last known copy of her collected works had been destroyed in World War II, but the young man eventually finds her brother who is still alive and in possession of her diaries. As you can see from the artwork below, the book is long and rectangular, creating a vast scape of art and words on each page.

* cover art and other artwork provided by the author with permission

I hope you're not reading this on a mobile device because it would be very hard for you to see the words and feel the art from this tiny narrow space. In fact, I really think you should just run to a library or a book store right now so that you can have this very substantial book in your hands. This impressive project is much longer than the average picture book. It is in fact a kind of double picture book in format, with the first half of the book being the story and the second part dedicated to the original poems in Japanese with their translation in English. Look at these excerpts below to realize why you really need to have a copy of this book in your hands.

This book would be perfect for older readers who are studying poetry, but it is also a book that informs without being didactic. Women's issues and domestic abuse are mentioned, as are venereal disease and suicide. It may seem like a hard sell if you have parents at your school who would object to such topics for children, however the topics are approached in such a way as to bring it to the foreground of the picture without explaining it. For example, mentioning that Misuzu caught a disease from her husband is not the same as saying that she caught a venereal disease, but it is. On the page where Misuzu decides to end her own life, she is faced away from the reader, private with her own pain. Her poems remain thoughtful but hopeful throughout the whole book, and the ending to the story shows how one person's life can positively impact a whole community in turmoil. In the aftermath of the Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami, Kaneko's poem "Are You an Echo?" was also shown as a public service announcement in place of advertisements on television. 

My children still remember the time after that earthquake as a really strange time. Some of their teachers at International School went home, but some of their classmates remained. Those of us who remained either stayed at home and worked remotely - an uncomfortable thing for the middle schoolers they were, or showed up to school and combined classes with whichever teachers remained. During that time, the pictures on the TV seemed to be on repeat - houses washed away, debris piled up and spilling inside windows of buildings. One oft-shown footage of a boat that is wedged on top of a house has been burned in my memory forever, and is mentioned in the book like a little tragic after note. However the thing that I most remember during those days was the spirit of the Japanese people just to keep going, and just to keep being in the world, imperfect as it was. The spirit of helping each other by whatever means possible is one that shines though this book in which a woman, mistreated in her own life, is able to still heal the hearts of the children she loves with her words; even from her grave.

​One of the most dramatic images in the book, cleaved basically in half by the valley in the middle, is the horrified look on Humpty's face as he realizes that his precious bird has landed neatly on top of the wall. Look at his face below. Can't you just imagine yourself and a time that your stomach sank to your knees when all of your best laid plans came crashing down around you? Children have less power than the rest of us - their lives controlled by adults who may or may not have kids' needs foremost in their minds. I believe that every child will have bucket loads of empathy for Humpty on this climactic page of reckoning.

* Cover art and this illustration provided by the author, with permission

Santat's Caldecott winning The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend shares certain aspects with After the Fall. There is something so fragile and vulnerable in each book, and to me the band-aids in this picture closely resemble the bits of sticky tape used to secure Beekle's cardboard crown. In every kid's daily life there are bandaids and tape, little imperfect tools that are used to hold things together until the bigger problems can be solved. In this picture, the bandaids peek out from Humpty's collar even as the huge wall looms reflected in his eyes.

It's this breathtaking attention to the detail and Santat's loving expression of feelings important to children that makes this book such a powerful book. The nursery rhyme really takes on another life and teaches gently without a hint of being didactic. Humpty knows better than anyone that each reader will make their own decisions and overcome their fears only at their own pace. The masterful climax is a twist that surprises everyone including our dear Humpty. Each one of us carries inside the secret happy ending we never knew we had.

I haven't visited this space in way too long. I don't have any particular excuse for that - life getting in the way sounds so trite, but for whatever reason I lost my words for a while. Ironically it took a wordless book to bring those words back to me.

​Draw the Line is simple and beautiful, an important book about the things that divide us. It can be read different ways by different people. I see it on a lap read by a mother and her two children. Or in a classroom to students as a way to discuss complex interpersonal interactions in a simplified way. I read it as someone who has experienced a really challenging year, as well as bearing witness to the personal tragedy of a good friend.

Colours and lines are used in this book in ways that tell the story. It's a little Harold and the Purple Crayon in the way that two boys create their own reality with a simply drawn line. They meet in the valley of the book, and it's this centre space where the action begins. Yellow tones are used as two cheerful boys play together with the rope they have made. Then purple tones appear as one of the boys is caught up in the rope. You can see from the progression of the story and the development of feelings as the action builds. What happens next, again in the valley of the book, is that the whole world comes apart and the boys are stuck on either side of a gaping chasm, the sky deeply purple and bruised.

The first time I came across this remarkable book I was walking around an ALA conference in Miami when I came to my friend Ellen's booth. I had heard about Kathryn Otoshi from another friend, and had been told to meet her if possible. Happily for me, she was sitting right at Ellen's table signing her newest book at the time, Beautiful Hands. I introduced myself and said that our mutual friend Junko had said we should meet, and suddenly a new story started to be written. Junko Yokota, by the way, is the kind of magical unicorn that you want to have in your life. She not only knows the best picture books, but the thing about Junko is that she knows the best people. As soon as Kathryn knew of our mutual friend she handed me the original artwork for Draw the Line and asked for my opinion. At first I thought there may be some misunderstanding. "No, Junko isn't here with me," I said. "She's in a meeting." However Kathryn insisted that she wanted my opinion, and Ellen's, and Ellen's son... and suddenly we were a little team of book assessors with this precious manuscript in our bare hands. We all looked at it, and it was astounding. It was quiet. Understated. Clear. Poignant. I handed the book back to Kathryn and said it was perfect. However this was an answer she wasn't prepared to accept. After all the book wasn't finished, there must be something we would change. Suddenly our book posse took on a new tone. We read it again with new eyes. And then again with different filters. And again we read it with a variant story. And we came up with some changes which our lovely author seemed excited to hear. Those ideas may well have been what was in her head already. The point is, all of us felt that WE were important contributors to a story that was yet to come to the world..

The magical thing about wordless books, and in particular this magical wordless book is of course the shared experience in storytelling. The most important contributor to the story is the reader. One child will remember a bullying incident on the playground and how it could have been different. One mother will think of the time that she and her child seemed to be on different sides of a raging river. Someone else who reads the book might remember last Christmas and the difficult political conversations that happened between aunt Jude and their big brother. Whatever the situation, when misunderstandings and bad feelings cause a rift, the trauma of that can make it seem like the world has suddenly ripped in half. What should you do when that happens? How do you think this book will end?

I'm going to do you a favour and leave it to you to find out. Find this book wherever it lives, in the library or in the bookstore and bring it into your classroom and your home. In bilingual or multilingual contexts wordless books are perfect because of course the story can be told in any language. The subject matter of this book gives it the added bonus of being able to help in situations where language has failed and misunderstandings have opened up a wide gap between cultures. The simplicity and the beauty of this story is that it really does belong to each and every reader, and the conversations that can take place between them.

The story is a simple comparison between the two mountains you can see on the cover of the book. One mountain has been created over a long time by mother nature, and the other has been created in less than an afternoon by a girl, Elizabeth, using her bucket and spade. Most pages follow a predictable pattern - the left page tells the story of the towering old mountain, the right tells the story of Elizabeth's sand mountain down on the beach. The little girl builds up her mountain to be almost as tall as herself, and she is justifiably proud of her effort. When the rain comes to pound down on the big mountain, it flattens out Elizabeth's mountain as well. The sudden rain shower doesn't last long, and neither do Elizabeth's tears, as she starts from scratch again.

I like this book for its simplicity and a description of the physical world that readers by themselves will have begun to discover. The comparison of the big mountain and the little mountain rarely seems forced, although it will take some thinking (or talking with adults) for the reader to figure out that the "new earth mountain" that Elizabeth is walking on has not changed itself in the same time frame as the book. The symmetry of the book has a real-time feel to it, although there are certainly cues in the text to explain that mountains are made over millions of years. The lining up of the left and right pictures is very clever in some ways, but the continuation of the lines may suggest a real-time comparison to some young readers.

The colors are really nice - the earthy tones of nature and the clean, crisp white + primary colors of childhood. I found myself a little distracted by the white strip of page along the bottom, on which the text appears in all of its symmetry. It is apparent that the text is trying to stay away from the imagery and highlight the symmetry of the picture, however the whiteness of that strip seems like a lazy choice. I'm not an artist, but I found myself wishing they had come up with a more creative way of presenting the text - even if only to put it on an earthier toned background. This is an older book (1988) and I find myself wondering if it were to be published today - would different design choices be made?

All in all, I think this is a great book for parents and children to read together after a nice day at the beach or even in a sandpit. Although the story is not an exciting barrel of laughs, this simple storyline will appeal to children who have a fascination with the natural world.

The story follows a little girl in a red coat following her distracted father through an otherwise grey cityscape, stopping to pick colorful wildflowers she spots along the way. The pages you see above show that the book utilizes the square pages in different ways to further the story. Whole page illustrations show the bright red coat of the girl against the background, which starts in black and white and slowly grows more colorful as the story progresses. Other pages have a comic book feel and have special things to say. Notice in the nine frame page above that it seems that the flower sees the little girl at the same time as she sees the flower (look at the perspective in frame #7) suggesting that wildflowers are calling out to be noticed and picked. Further on in the book, the dual frame with the park and the dead bird shows that color comes into the background world as the little girl decides to use her wildflowers as a colorful tribute. As the story goes on, the little girl shares her wildflowers again and again, and each time she does the surrounding world gets a little more vibrant.

When I think of children from war-torn countries reading this book, several things come to mind and some of them bring a dull ache into my heart. The story of a small girl who can walk safely through the street, letting go of Daddy's hand as he talks on his mobile phone while resting his shopping by the side of the road while she climbs up embankments to gather wildflowers I feel would be painfully out of reach to refugees in Syria, and along the escape route as families struggle to survive in any way possible. On the other hand, the idea that little tiny pockets of color exist in places to which young children are naturally attuned might be as true in Syria as it is in Canada. The little girl's tribute to the fallen bird is absolutely heartbreaking in the context of children who have likely lost family members along the way. It makes me wonder what feelings this page will bring up for Syrian refugee parents and children who read it, and how they will deal with these emotions. It is easy for politicians and others to speak of the "problem" of refugees, but in all honesty, how absolutely insignificant these inconveniences seem compared to the devastating loss of life and the constant threat of violence from which these families have so desperately fled?

After the little girl in the book has finished making her small world more beautiful with her tiny floral gifts, there is a double spread where she looks up in the sky at the freely flying birds and places the last flower in her own hair. It might be cold outside, because she's pulling up her hood. This optimistic double spread is also a call to thoughtful self-care, and the independence the little girl shows as she now walks alone outside puts her independently in charge of her own surroundings. She's safe enough, having arrived at her destination. The lack of highly detailed illustration on this page harkens to the unharmed, unfettered simplicity of childhood. It's possible that this spirit is still alive inside the refugee recipients of this book. Let's hope so.

​
Another book I previously wrote about, My Two Blankets, uses color to show the journey of refugees and the difficulties of arriving in a new land where everything (including language) is strange. In Sidewalk Flowers, in the context of being read with refugee children who do not yet speak English, the gradual transition from black and white to color in this book is surely indicative of arriving in a foreign world, and finding your own place bit by bit as you gather beauty along the way. The language-free format of the book makes it possible for this book to be read in whatever way it is most needed.

For Syrian refugees arriving in Canada, this gift is an eloquent and deeply meaningful welcome to a new, more secure world. For the rest of us who buy this book, it is the perfect Christmas (or New Year, or Hanukkah, or Pancha Ganapati or other holiday) celebration this December as we open our hearts to the love of humanity and innocent children.

Endpapers of rough washi paper set the tone of the tone which takes place in the natural world and suggestive of natural hues and textures used throughout the book. As you can see from the example artwork on the illustrator's page, the magpie will, throughout the book, collect way too much stuff and as he does, the artwork will become much more overwhelming and oppressive through the use of messy detail and foreboding shadow. The words are deliberately kept simple - words and phrases rather than sentences to indicate the ebb and flow of the increasing and decreasing stuff on the page. This makes it a great book for young children and beginning ESL students (I don't think the pictures are too babyish for older kids), and a good conversation starter around the holidays when we all seem to accumulate too much stuff.

The author of the book is a self-proclaimed "small-house person in a McMansion-loving world", and her strong preference for simple living is evident throughout the book. The identification tag attached to the magpie's leg is a sad reminder that he or she is part of a human world and that there is literally no escape from all the stuff, but within that confine we can do certain things to arrange and curate our own belongings to get things under control and free ourselves from the nightmare that is too much stuff.

The last page (spoiler alert) shows the magpie and the mouse flying away with just a few of the most precious items wrapped up in a ribbon. This page to me is where things may get a little bit too didactic. It could be just that I have never known the true joy of being a minimalist, and my half-read copy of Marie Kondo's trending book is probably testament to the fact that I have not learned the lesson that the magpie has learned. I've moved several times and twice internationally - I get that paring down your stuff will set you free, but somehow the magpie and mouse taking flight with two little items wrapped up in a ribbon seems too easy. 

Either way - it's probably time to tidy up my place and especially my purple book cart, so this book is probably a call to a better life. 

These days my town has become much more multicultural due (in part) to an influx of refugees from Sudan. Not all of our white residents have been welcoming to the newcomers, but I really like to think that Australians on the whole are willing to give people at least a "fair go" - the benefit of the doubt. Others in the town, like my friend who is herself a reverse refugee of sorts (she moved back home from Fukushima in Japan after the earthquake with her two small children), work actively in the area to make sure our most vulnerable new residents are made feel welcomed in the community. I asked my friend what Christmas present she could recommend me to buy myself from my hometown, and she recommended this book.

The author, originally from Austria and an immigrant to Australia (and my hometown), wrote this book about a real-life encounter she witnessed in a local park when her daughter befriended a girl from Sudan. The story is simple - the two little girls spend time together in the park while the girl from Sudan learns English. At home, the girl curls up under her "blanket" (a metaphor for her life experiences and language). As her English language develops, she has two blankets - her old one and the new one, woven from new experiences and words as she collects them.

Two colour palettes are used deliberately throughout the book, and you can see them right on the cover above. The "old blanket" from Sudan and all things Sudanese are painted in rich red tones, warm and dark and familiar. The "new blanket" colours (everything from the new land) are fresh, cold, pale or dull blues and grays. In this way you can feel how foreign and unfamiliar the new land is to the young girl. When she makes a "new blanket" from her new experiences and knowledge, she is not replacing the "old blanket". Rather, she now has two blankets and a wealth of life experiences that she can call her own.

My hometown in Australia is probably gearing up for another summer Christmas right now. The old designs of Christmas firs and snow probably still decorate some Christmas cards, while on others Summer Santa is surfing on his surfboard while his kangaroos loll on the beach drinking a beer. Australia is finding its own identity around Christmas, but it is also finding ways to include residents for whom Christmas itself is not as familiar. Whatever your views this season, it is to be hoped that the love in your heart (the love that starts with two children in the park) is the most important thing.

The moment I picked this book up off the Dav Pilkey signing table at the ALA conference I was taken away. Don't you just love a good end paper (pictured above) that immediately draws you right into the story? The cars and trucks of early morning America are commuting across the bridge in the extreme early morning. By the final end paper when they are making the return commute under a moonlit sky the book has lived exactly one day in the life of Americans. It's simply a beautiful simple timeline told mostly through the medium of children.

When Barack Obama was sworn in the second time in 2013, this poem by Richard Blanco was recited at the podium. Obama  had had an eventful first term, but the essence of America remained the same. The good, the bad, the ugly all come together in this exquisite book to paint a picture of one uneventful, but very thoughtful day. This book feels like the people in it are living deliberately. It feels like they are moving forward. From the very first endpaper done in vibrant, deliberate colors this book is a distinct declaration, not of national pride, but of national collective effort to move forward. "Yes, we can!" proclaimed the President the first time he took office. This book is a hopeful disclaimer to that proclamation, that a country is only as great as the hopes and dreams within it - that darkness happens but it's this very darkness that could prove the mettle of our worth.

The lines in this book are absolutely stunning. There are lines cast by sunlight, and lines cast by shadow. There are lines that are man-made objects such as buildings and bridges, and lines in the natural world that make up these poignant illustrations. When I think of Dav Pilkey I like others think of the simple line drawings of Captain Underpants, but this book (along with Caldecott honor book The Paperboy, and other works such as God Bless the Gargoyles) is another side to Dav Pilkey's work filled with strong, dark colors that have something to say.

Get this book. Get it now. If you have children (and even if you don't) I already have an idea which page will stab you right in your heart, but I'll keep that to myself and let you experience this book for yourself. Have a good day. And if you're in a place in your life where good days are eluding you, have a better one tomorrow. Either way, read this book as a call to a better life more deliberately lived in full colour.