Caldecott Medal Contender: Saturday

by Sam Juliano

Come Saturday morning
I’m goin’ away with my friend
Well Saturday-spend ’til the end of the day-ay
Just I and my friend
We’ll travel for miles in our Saturday smiles
And then we’ll move on    -The Sandpipers, 1969

Picture book wunderkind Oge Mora, a master of collage and familial immersion, won a Caldecott Honor last year for her maiden work Thank You Omu!, a stirring tribute to her beloved Grandmother.  Omu, a miracle of acrylic collage, china markers, pastels, patterned paper and old book clippings is a story of magnanimity, gratefulness and the adage that in the end one will be treated as they treat others.  To be sure the book is a study of sacrifice and how the most noble in our ranks will think of themselves only after they’ve thought of everyone around them.  Mora has followed her magnificent debut with another exploration of the family, again with an acute focus on a special relationship and again using the same style and materials that made the first book so resplendent.  Disavowing the common conviction of the week’s sixth day, Mora paints a picture of plans gone awry on the one day when mutual freedom should set the stage for blissful negotiation to complete appointments and unique entertainment.  In the end of course bad luck does nothing to impact the only things that really matters:  synergy and love.

End papers sporting varying shades of violet showcase a monthly calendar featured X’d off dates, with only Saturday the 30th left to be completed.  Big bright stars connote planned activities for for the titular weekend day, and the planned content is auspicious as is the wish list printed by a youngster.  A busy double page title spread launches Saturday’s story arc, with a young girl rising from bed as her mother greets a new day with coffee.  Plenty of collage cut outs signify familial bliss, one where positive energy greatly outweighs economic limitations.  This basic premise is accentuated by the revelation that Ava’s hard-working mom even works on Sunday in a six-day schedule.  Only Saturday, the reprieve so many baby boomers relied on for early morning television, trips to the local library, outdoor basketball and baseball games and for some the certainty they’d sleep way past their normal wake-up time.  In a quartet of paper cut vignettes, Mora depicts a diverse itinerary, involving story-time at the library, a trip to the beauty salon, outdoor quality time at the local park, and as a special finale for this particular penultimate day of the week. Mora the illustrator frames the happy anticipation in bumblebee yellow which allows the collages to jump off the page in three-dimensional sublimity.  Mora the author encapsulates the cheery expectations with a circular frenzy of Mom and and daughter in preparatory mode.

After their exit is announced with Zoom! they head up the street to the library which is framed in vivid shapes and newspaper clippings.  But much like movie patrons arriving at a theater for a popular movie only to get turned down because of a sell-out, Ava and her mom are chagrined to learn (via a sign at the front desk) that the story time session is cancelled.  Though there is reassuring guarantee of sorts that the following week won’t disappoint, the two don’t find that to be any kind of consolation:  They paused, closed their eyes, and–whew!–let out a deep breath.  Ava’s mother downplays the story time rebuff, and notes that Saturday will always be far more than the sum of its parts.  Again the undaunted refrain:  Today will be special.  Today will be splendid.  Today is Saturday!  

The second stage of their Saturday program at the salon in a cubicle titled “Sisters” was a resounding success, but as if fate were in charge of this day a car whooshes by splashing water on them consummately, leaving their painstaking hairdos trashed.  Mora’s double page tapestry invokes a hopeless scenario in oceanic terms, but on the following page the indomitable duo are again guided by the mom’s proclamation that there isn’t a thing in the world that compromise the sacred kinship they share on this special day.  They zoom off to the park to absorb some peace and quiet but in a hectic scene that might induce adult readers to sing:

Saturday in the park,
I think it was the Fourth of July
Saturday in the park,
I think it was the Fourth of July

People dancing, people laughing
A man selling ice cream
Singing Italian songs
Everybody is another
Can you dig it (yes, I can)
And I’ve been waiting such a long time
For Saturday.

what is happening is supremely opposite to what they hanker for.

In a vibrant tapestry that picture book readers might compare to Lauren Castillo’s Caldecott Honor-winning Nana and the City, where grandma and her granddaughter are only too willing to engage but Ada and her mom are looking for far more intimacy.  Mora’s patchwork collage of bustling activity is magnificent and will have students shifting their eyes in all directions.  After their mutual deep breath mom again puts the brakes on any lasting depression by assuring Ada that no human foul ups can ever nor will ever lessen the meaning of a day that will always end on a high note regardless of the obstacles they must cross getting there.  Still, with only one more scheduled event left they couldn’t help but think:  Today will be ruined if we miss that bus!!!  So again they zoom off on the bus for the capper, the one event that alone can make them forget the series of mishaps that met them at every turn.  “Hooray for Saturday” they cheer.  But then the final coup de grace for this doomed day that Nick Carter honored in his song  “Is It Saturday Yet?” came down when the mother to her great horror realized she left the tickets for the puppet show on the kitchen table.  Mom takes sole blame telling her daughter:  Story time was canceled, our hair was ruined, the park was loud, and now we’re missing the puppet show.  I’m sorry Ava.  We looked forward to this all week, and I’ve messed up everything….I ruined Saturday.”

Incorporating warm pink and orange Mora paints a far more upbeat climax than the previous events would seem to portend, but Ava comes forward to inform her mother that the day’s failures were totally mitigated but the togetherness they experienced through the seemingly cursed Saturday.  The artists’s hug scene again crated in irresistible collage is one of the year’s more moving pages in any 2019 picture book.  In a solemn but soulful walk to their apartment (framed again with Mora’s remarkable aforementioned employment of acrylic paint, china markers, patterned paper and old book clippings that permeate the entire book) Mom and daughter stage their own puppet show, one that of course is far more personal, creative and intimate than any they hoped to witness earlier that day.  Somehow you get the feeling that that final snuggle on the couch (one might recall the homespun camaraderie in Vera William’s Caldecott Honor winning A Chair for My Mother) is fully earned and a validation of the conviction that it never what you do, or where you go, or how you spend time, but only who you spend it with.

A lovely scrapbook-styled inside cover in ravishing violet pictures our protagonists ensconced in permanency, giving Saturday a documentary-like tribute to the memory and those fleeting moments in our lives that mean more than anything.  At the very least Mora has matched her acclaimed, award-winning debut with a loving extension of familial bonding.  The Caldecott committee should take notice of the emotionally stirring text and the brilliant fusion of color and shapes.  To boot the dust jacket cover competes as the very finest of the year in that department.  Saturday?  What’s not to adore?

Note:  This is the fourth entry in the 2019 Caldecott Medal Contender series.  The annual venture does not purport to predict what the committee will choose, rather it attempts to gauge what the writer feels should be in the running.  In most instances the books that are featured in the series have been touted as contenders in various online round-ups at children’s book sites, but for the ones that are not, the inclusions are a humble plea to the committee for consideration.  It is anticipated the series will include in the neighborhood of around 15 to 20 titles; the order which they are being presented in is arbitrary, as every book in this series is a contender.  Some of my top favorites of the lot will be done near the end.  The awards will be announced in January, hence the reviews will continue until the early part of that month.