Caldecott Medal Contenders: The Boy and the Whale; The Ring Bearer; A Perfect Day; The Little Red Cat; Grand Canyon; Blue Sky White Stars; When’s My Birthday?; Tony; The Wolf The Duck & The Mouse; Her Right Foot; Silent Days Silent Dreams, Big Machines and How to Be an Elephant

by Sam Juliano

Note:  The Caldecott Medal announcements will be broadcast via ALA streaming early Monday morning, February 12th.  The forty-first and final full essay, “Listen” by Leda Schubert and Raul Colon was published in mid-afternoon on Sunday, February 11th as a result of time winding down.  However, there are thirteen other books that are as deserving as the previously forty-one, and I feel that short capsules need to be provided in this final round-up post.  The thirteen (13) titles are The Boy and the Whale, The Ring Bearer, A Perfect Day, The Little Red Cat Who Ran Away and Learned His ABC’s the Hard Way, The Wolf, The Duck & The Mouse, Her Right Foot, Grand Canyon, How It Feels to Be a Boat, Blue Sky White Stars and When’s My Birthday?, Tony, Big Machines and Silent Days Silent Dreams.  Adding thirteen to the forty-one full reviews published we ended up with fifty-four (54) books in our 2017 Caldecott Medal series.

The Boy and the Whale (Mordecai Gerstein)

A brown-skinned, shaggy haired son of a fisherman serves as the book’s narrator.  They live near the ocean and discover one morning that a whale has become entwined in their only fishing net.  The father’s anger extended to his use of words the boy had never heard.  When the father tells his son we must save it, the son thinks he means the whale, but the clarification that he means the fishing net leaves the boy in disbelief.  But left untended the boy heads out in the panga and resolves through astonishing bravery to free the whale with the help his his trusty knife in a sequence that recalls the mouse’s teeth work to free the lion in a Caldecott Medal winner by Jerry Pinkney.  the story is tension packed and includes some of the most spectacular illustrations in any picture book of 2017.  One is vertical and contains vignettes, another shows the whale leaping up from the ocean.  Gerstein, who won a Caldecott Medal for his emotionally wrenching The Man Who Walked Between the Towers employs a ravishing aquamarine color scheme with yellow borders.  The dedication and opening page spread with the the color splashes is stunning.  Though The Boy and the Whale is one of my three favorite books of the entire year, I am at a loss to explain how I missed giving it a full review.  But this capsule is enough to propel it among the best books of 2017 via the Caldecott Medal Contender series.

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Caldecott Medal Contender: Listen

by Sam Juliano

I think the opposite was true. I think he loved America so much that he was particularly offended and disappointed when it strayed, as it so often has, from the noble ideals upon which it was founded. I don’t think that feeling, or the protests it engendered, were anti-American. I think they were wholly, unabashedly American.

-Andrew Cohen, The Atlantic, January 28, 2014

 Listen: How Pete Seeger Got America Singing is a labor of love for author Leda Schubert.  In her impassioned afterward to the picture book biography of folk music icon and ardent social activist Pete Seeger, she reveals that this quintessential American once sang at her nursery school, that she was a regular at his concerts, taught herself to play the five-string banjo using his book How to Play the Five-String Banjo, and once told him directly how much he meant to her.  Schubert was subsequently reassured by Seeger’s wife Toshi that despite seeming indifference he couldn’t be more appreciative.  Seeger was a globe-trotting, astonishingly prolific artist, one whom Schubert notes “devoted much of his life and music to the fights for justice, peace, equality and a cleaner environment” and whom was once quoted as saying we humans “have a fifty-fifty percent chance of surviving another century, but that our participation can make all the difference.  Though Seeger lived beyond his ninety-fourth birthday he was irreplaceable.  His rich and focused life had impacted millions around the world, many of whom as the author confirms have never forgotten the words to those life-changing lyrics.

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Caldecott Medal Contender: Dazzle Ships

by Sam Juliano

U boats are sailing once more.         -The Producers

Dazzle Ships: World War I and the Art of Confusion by Chris Barton and Victo Ngai is an  avant garde masterwork.   If the American Library Association had a separate category for Most Distinguished Picture Book Cover, I’d imagine this would be one of the finalists. Of course, with Dazzle Ships it is a package deal from end papers, through the initial double page spread (sneaky, stripy camouflage ship) and the arresting multi patterned and colored art, it is quite the visually captivating experience, and quite unlike any First World War book yet published. Though I do personally adore 2017 non fiction picture book works by Katherine Roy, Molly Bang and Jason Chin, I have a hunch that if a non-fiction ends up on the winners circle this year it will probably be this one. Ngai’s art is original, unique, visionary, and frame-worthy. I do see the studied preparation to the source and a glowing future career for this gifted illustrator. The final Metropolis canvas (Times change; Technology changes) is really spectacular. I appreciate the sustained motifs and the mastery of scale and find this as a book that certainly rewards repeated visits.

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Caldecott Medal Contender: Out of Wonder

by Sam Juliano

Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets is a picture book, much as Paul B. Janeczko and Melissa Sweet’s Firefly July of a few years back also begged that categorization (seasonal theme rather than individual poets), where it was being touted as a strong contender for that year’s Caldecott Medal. I also feel that Out of Wonder is one of the most spectacularly beautiful picture books of this or any other year and that the extraordinarily gifted Ekua Holmes has eclipsed her superlative work for Voice of Freedom, a book of course that won her a well-deserved Caldecott Honor.  The subject matter of Voice called for somber tones, textures and colors, and a sustained earthiness that called attention to the difficult life of its noble protagonist. With this book, it seems clear that Holmes is equally adept at pictorially transcribing life’s more sublime themes, fully attuned to each of the magnificent poems she interprets. For utter color-swirling resplendence it is comparable to this year’s Muddy, but Holmes’ daunting task was to change course for every turn of the page, and what she has done here translates to a staggering achievement.

Out of Wonders celebrates the joy of the poetic form, featuring twenty seminal figures, from four different eras, gathering together in three parts, “Got Style?,” “In Your Shoes” and “Thank You.”  The poetry interpreters are Kwayme Alexander, Chris Colderley and Marjory Wentworth, who strive to capture the spirit, themes and feeling in some of the most venerated poets with the spectacular collage accompaniment by Holmes who beings astonishing diversity to this wide-reaching tribute.  From the 1200’s when the Persian Rumi (1207-1273) plied his craft through the 1600’s in Japan with Matsuo Basho up to the present day where the still living Mary Oliver, Naomi Shihab and Billy Collins are active the three exponents of the renowned free spirits chosen work to bring lyrical kinship within the most soulful of forms.

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Caldecott Medal Contender: A Different Pond

by Sam Juliano

The story commands an emotional heft worthy of Allen Say. The esteemed illustrator, Thi Bui skillfully weaves smaller illustrations within larger ones, and never loses the focus at hand.  Acclaimed author Bao Phi’s metaphorical applications (“A kid at my school said my dad’s English sounds like a thick, dirty river, but to me his English sounds like gentle rain”) are achingly beautiful.  Together they forge a current of wistful melancholia, via familial bonding that will linger on for a lifetime.  The picture book, A Different Pond is a collaboration of two Vietnamese born artists, who both were raised in the United States, the male author in Minneapolis, the female graphic illustrator in California and New York.  Rarely has a simple dedication page said so much in tandem, in its tribute to immigrants, working people and the young.  In fact all three of these demographics are at the center of a book meant to connect cultures and the challenges facing the displaced everywhere.  The memories are as deep as those Hew Morgan asserted were at the core of his being in Richard Llewelyn’s How Green Was My Valley.  

The book’s poetic dust jacket cover, replicated on the inside panel and within depicts starry Minnesota darkness at a time well before the waking house, perhaps just about the time the young boy in Dav Pilkey’s Caldecott Honor winning The Paperboy left his home to deliver newspapers.  A boy and his father are seen fishing at a pond during autumn.  This ravishing tapestry well deserves a three-peat during the course of this wholly resonant work.  The beige end papers feature items from their home, including sneakers, Miracle Whip, a teddy bear and an ornament.  The story is narrated by the young boy, who first reveals that that his father, who with his son will be leaving their home at around 4:00 P.M.  A “bare bulb” burning in the kitchen confirms a family hard pressed to make ends meet.  Sandwiches are packed for the nocturnal fishing expedition, intended to secure food for the family.  Dad and son head out in the heated car during a time few cars are out on the road.  Phi’s movingly resonant language is first posed in response to the boy’s observation that a kid at his school likens his father’s Asian cadenced English as “a thick, dirty river.”  But to be his English sounds like gentle rain.  Bui’s bold-lined, paneled art includes intimate inserts meant to capture moods and expressions and set apart such moments within their own dramatic parameters.

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The Nickel Ride

By J.D. Lafrance

I sometimes wonder while watching a heist film, what happens to the loot from a big score? Where is it stored? The Nickel Ride (1974) answers these questions by focusing on a man in charge of a set of Los Angeles warehouses that store the loot. It is a crime film you might not have heard of as it doesn’t have the pedigree of something like The Getaway (1972), which was directed by Sam Peckinpah and starred Steve McQueen. Instead, this film was directed by veteran journeyman Robert Mulligan (To Kill A Mockingbird) and starred Jason Miller, fresh from the critical and commercial success of The Exorcist (1973). Despite being nominated for the Palme d’Or, The Nickel Ride wasn’t well-received and quickly disappeared into obscurity, which is a shame because it deserves to be as highly regarded as other films of its ilk.

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Caldecott Medal Contender: This House, Once

by Sam Juliano

The last time a picture book featuring a house as its central character connected intimately with the world around it was none other than Virginia Lee Burton’s Caldecott Medal winning The Little House back in 1940.  The indomitable country cottage witnessed technological advancements and population increases, transforming idyllic pastures to urban congestion.  Burton’s classic posed the modest structure as a symbol, an unchanging  seasonal sentry who watched the countryside transform until she was crowded out to the point where time and place became insignificant.  The focus in Deborah Freedman’s This House, Once is more elemental, for whatever the inborn kinship with the world around it.  For young readers the book teaches the origin of the materials used to build, for adults the metaphysical implications of how tangible materials were at one time part of nature’s scheme.  Indeed, one of children’s literature’s deepest thinkers, Freedman, once an architect, will have the most astute wanting to trace everything back to a starting point.  Tucked neatly but resolutely through the pages is an acute sense of loss, unavoidable in a world where turnover is inevitable in both tangible and symbolic ways.

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Caldecott Medal Contender: Windows

by Sam Juliano

But leave me a little love, 

A voice to speak to me in the day end, 

A hand to touch me in the dark room 

Breaking the long loneliness. 

In the dusk of day-shapes 

Blurring the sunset, 

One little wandering, western star 

Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow. 

Let me go to the window, 

Watch there the day-shapes of dusk 

And wait and know the coming 

Of a little love.             -Carl Sandberg

Certainly a child would never envision it for obvious reasons, but as an adult reader I was almost expecting to see in that remarkable eighteen window showcase at the book’s center, the wheel chair-bound James Stewart looking out through one of the windows with his camera or binoculars spying on the activities of other neighbors. Of course nothing as abominable as what went on in behind one window across the courtyard in Hitchcock’s 1954 masterpiece could ever transpire in the celebration of life known as Windows, but there is nonetheless a brooding sensibility in E.B. Goodale’s art that more than warrants a comparison.   In the acclaimed coming-of-age novel House on Mango Street by Sandra Sisneros focuses on a young Latina girl named Esperanza. Throughout the book, window imagery is used as a symbol of regret and entrapment. For example, we learn that Esperanza’s long-dead great-grandmother spent her life sitting sadly by her window, stuck in an unhappy marriage. Four women in Esperanza’s neighborhood are trapped in their apartments and they also sit by their windows, looking down onto the street. When Esperanza sees these women, she vows never to become one of them.

Of course Windows’ focus is far more benign and scene-specific.  The metaphor of the window as a device to establish a human connection with the community and shared activities and rituals by just taking a stroll down the street (the twilight canvas with its golden hues and illuminated portals to life and all we do to sustain ourselves, including our reverence for animal companions is a pictorial jewel) is ingenious. Goodale’s art makes superlative use of line sketches You might pass a cat! and autumnal colors One window might be tall, with the curtains drawn…) and perspective Another window could be dark… and then the darkened house everyone remembers from their youth, though this one displays a stone statue of the Virgin Mother (like the line drawings of garbage can and shopping carriage and full color of dog and red hood).

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Fish Obscuro: Himala (Philippines; Ishmael Bernal)

by Jared Dec

Himala (Philippines 1982…Ishmael Bernal) 124m

DVD 2 (unrestored only), 3 (2012 restoration, Philippines only)

Aka: Miracle

Do you believe?

The Philippines is not one of the foremost countries for cinema. In fact, largely only Lino Brocka and more recently, Lav Diaz are discussed when the topic comes up for this much-troubled country’s films. In my opinion however, the Philippines is one of the most underrated countries for film. Aside from a mere handful of films, most of the films described as major works by Filippino cineastes are unavailable on DVD, and so I feel it is my duty here to give some exposure to perhaps the greatest Filippino film of them all. Himala is not an easy film, a deep, brooding meditation on the nature of faith and fraud that is deeply rooted in the Philippines’ history of Catholicism and traditional superstition. Those however who are willing to brave some cultural barriers and dig through this film’s many layers will find a masterpiece that more than earns its place in the ever-growing canon.

Elsa, is a young, unmarried woman who was abandoned in her childhood but adopted by a poor woman. Elsa has few work prospects, even fewer marriage prospects, and little hope for her future. She seems to be doomed to a life as an old maid in a poor, rural village, when suddenly she claims to have seen the Virgin Mary herself and begins preaching her message and healing the sick. Many are skeptical at first, but soon the whole area becomes caught up in a feverish bought of religiousness and hailing Elsa as a prophet. However with her claimed divine powers comes a plethora of problems. The local Catholic church doubts her claims of miracles, brothels open up in the town to service the many tourists, crime skyrockets in the small town, and perhaps most devastating of all, people begin putting all their faith in her miracles which starts to have horrifying consequences. Elsa is forced to confront these consequences while many of her followers reveal their true fickle nature, leading to a conclusion that is equal parts brilliant and unpleasant.

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Caldecott Medal Contender: Muddy

by Sam Juliano

That Mississippi sound, that Delta sound is in them old records. You can hear it all the way through.  -Muddy Waters

His renowned guitar playing was once said to “launch a thousand bands.”  The Rolling Stones named themselves after his 1950 song “Rollin Stone” and the most famous of rock publication, Rolling Stone Magazine similarly decided on their own name based on that same number.  He was one of the most influential musicians in the nation’s history with some like Eric Clapton, who later served as best man at his wedding, counting him as the poll position occupant in that regard.  His rise to prominence and fame from the red earth and cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta to the blues clubs and recording studios of the Windy City was a defining moment in music and perhaps the culture at large, but taken in intimate terms the ascendancy of McKinley Morganfield, much better known as Muddy Waters is the kind of things dreams are made of.  Muddy: The Story of Blues Legend Muddy Waters By Michael Mahin is indeed a fever dream of a biography, one pictorially fueled by Evan Turk’s electrifying abstract watercolor art, which also utilizes oil pastels, china marker, printing ink and newspaper collage.  This melting pot of forms results in tapestries of exceeding emotional power and pictorial complexity, interpreting Waters’ music in purely visceral terms.

Turk’s dynamic visual style was first seen in his critically acclaimed collaboration with Bethany Hegedus and Arum Gandhi, titled Grandfather Gandhi, and subsequently in a sequel with Hegedus, Be the Change, before the young Colorado born illustrator went solo on The Storyteller, a mind-blowing, labyrinthine picture book combining traditional images with a those one might encounter in a stream of consciousness.  While fervent art fans might reach the conclusion that Turk’s art is too auspicious and advanced for a picture book for the youngest readers the truth is that his kaleidoscopic tapestries shimmer with movement, invariably poised to capture the attention of early grade students attracted to visceral design.  No matter how one sizes up the prime audience for his work the irrefutable fact is that he is one of the most exciting talents out there today, and the release of every new book showcasing his art is cause for celebration.

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