by Sam Juliano
Hope is the thing with feathers; That perches in the soul,
In last year’s Caldecott Honor winning Leave Me Alone by Vera Brosgol, an old granny tires of chaos and deafening noise in her overpopulated house and escapes through a secret door, only to find out that life in another region offers up the same obstacles as those experienced in her domestic environs. The people residing in the fictional village of La Paz in Carmen Agra Deedy and Eugene Yelchin’s The Rooster Who Would Not Be Quiet, like Brosgol’s overheated guardian, need some rest and relaxation. The problem with this proposition in Deedy’s book is that innocuous intent can often result in dire consequences. For all its deadpan humor and amusing underpinnings this allegorical story is a thinly veiled cautionary tale about foolhardy concession and the abuse of power. Put in more basic terms its conforms to the tenets of a timeless adage, “You don’t know what you have until it’s gone.” The book’s original title was The Noisy Little Rooster, but the alteration is so much better attuned to the work’s unmistakable theme.
The pictorial response to Deedy’s Once there was a village where the streets rang with song from morning till night is a quilted countryside at the forefront of a cluster of thatched buildings, a few of which are chapels. Woven into the many plots, distinguishable by color are musical notes, depicting a blissful hamlet, unencumbered by curtailment of any sort. This lyrically acoustic Shangri-La is a veritable cornucopia of sound, all converging in and around a town square. Albeit, some is of the bombastic variety – a man shouting into a bullhorn, a car with loud speakers passing through, church bells peeling and a boy marching to his own drum beat, other reverberations are suffused with more soulful cadences, such as a man playing an accordion, bus passengers strutting their choral prowess, birds singing in a tree, a married couple singing and playing guitar on a park bench and even a man singing in a shower with open window. A tea kettle contributes a signature toot to the cacophony, but more natural sounds like water gushing from a fountain or a goat neighing complicate this antithesis to the pastoral lifestyle. Yelchin’s mixed media eye candy applications were created by oil pastel, colored pencil, gouache and acrylic and the polychromatic double page canvas are vigorously applied in kid friendly mode. Alas, like the denizens in Ron Barrett’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs too much of a supposedly good thing on an everyday basis will render this propensity stagnant. The residents of La Paz tired of the constant sensory chaos and finally decided to serve up their Mayor with his walking papers. Yelchin humorously visualizes this with an index finger extended, ordering the town’s chagrined highest ranking official to quit the premises, after a family of four and even their canine can no longer endure the deafening rumpus. (more…)
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