Caldecott Medal Contender: It Fell from the Sky

by Sam Juliano

The titular creature from E.B. White’s iconic Charlotte’s Web was noble, erudite and compassionate.  In the modern picture book classic, the Caldecott Honor-winning  The Spider and the Fly by the nineteenth century poet Mary Howitt and artist Tony Di Terlizzi an iniquitous conman, plots a carnivorous conquest.  In Eric and Terry Fan’s It Fell from the Sky the crafty anthropoid wearing a stovepipe hat lies squarely in the middle of those two literary incarnations on the moral compass.  From the start this schemer was driven by avarice, and his the story of his rise and fall is a cautionary tale with pointed political parallel, though the Fans bring a lesson-learned coda to their delightful tale.  The brothers,  presently working out of Toronto, hold dual citizenship, so they are eligible for Caldecott awards, much as they have been previously in a distinguished and prolific career of picture book masterpieces such as The Night Gardener, The Antlered Ship, The Darkest Dark, The Scarecrow and The Barnabus Project.  Each new work by the tireless duo invariably brings on proclamations from their admirers that they have outdone themselves this time, and the same can be said for It Fell from the Sky, a bonanza of graphic resplendence that stunningly combines beautiful monochrome with incandescent color.

The Fans open their latest fantasy with an announcement that an object fell from the sky on a Thursday, a mid-week day bearing no special significance. The green and yellow marble nestles between flower plants, from where a Ladybug claims she observed the unexpected intrusion on their normally tranquil space.  Her contention that the marble bounced three times before rolling to a stop is contested by the Inchworm who counters it only bounced twice.  All the others, including the first pipe-smoking insect to appear in a picture book since Carson Ellis’s Du Iz Tak?, a Caldecott Honor recipient, concur the event was unprecedented in their collective consciousness.  The walking-stick, another one smitten with pipe-smoking gleefully observed he was being upstaged in the “strangeness” department, and the frog concluded it must be a gumdrop until the taste turned him off.  The dung beetle resolved to move it, but found that task impossible, and the Stinkbug brings on yet another theory, whereupon this alien object didn’t come from the sky at all, but was home grown, like a flower.  At long last the Grasshopper, the insect denomination of the Rabbi in Fiddler on the Roof and the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz is consulted for what is expected to be a sage interpretation.  He asserts it did actually fall from the sky, but specifies it is probably a star, a comet or even a planet.

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Caldecott Medal Contender: Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre

by Sam Juliano

On July, 15, 2021 children’s literature lost one of its most renowned luminaries.  With nearly one-hundred books as an illustrator produced in a remarkably prolific career launched in 1988, African-American Floyd Cooper, who passed from cancer at age 65 was an author-artist who moved mountains in the book community and on social media where he was revered as a personable and humble man who exuded positive energy in the direction of any person fortunate enough to have crossed his path.  Cooper, who also had Native American blood was one of the most critically celebrated figures in the industry and his works won numerous awards for the Coretta Scott King, Golden Kite and Charlotte Zolotow committees.  Floyd has never won a Caldecott medal or honor citation in one om those freakish omissions usually attributed to timing and the depth of competition in a given year.  In the Caldecott Medal Contender series staged here at Wonders in the Dark since 2013, four of Cooper’s books have been reviewed in sponsorship of award consideration:  A Dance Like Starlight (authored by Kristy Dempsey); Where’s Rodney? (written by Carmen Bogan); The Ring Bearer and Juneteenth for Mazie.  But Cooper’s full catalog is one of the most impressive of artist in children’s literature, and virtually every book he’s released has its own fan base.  Of course his wife Velma, children Dayton and Kai and his grandchildren have suffered the most from his untimely departure, so for the legions who feel cheated of more masterpieces, matters do need to be placed in the proper perspective.

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Caldecott Medal Contender: Watercress

by Sam Juliano

The Merriam-Webster definition of watercress is as follows:  “a perennial cress (Nasturtium officinale) native to Europe and southwestern Asia that is naturalized in the U.S. and has leaves used especially in salads or as a potherb.”

The physical manifestation of the exotic foodstuff provides the narrative centerpiece of Andrea Wang’s Watercress, but in an expansive sense it embodies love of family, the power of memory and how a simple ritual at the dinner table can shape and redefine life moving forward.  An aching melancholia underscores a story about childhood resistance and the inherent embarrassment one may feel when reminded of a past replete with struggle and little means to get by.  Wang’s descriptive poetry weaves a sustained mood and tone, but also, as attested by the story’s parental figures telling verisimilitude.  The author’s language is so precisely crafted and suffused with emotion, and it potently establishes atmosphere and coaxes sensory immersion through descriptive language and lovely similes.

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Caldecott Medal Contender: Someone Builds the Dream

by Sam Juliano

The creative process metaphorically evokes a conveyor belt, where each worker is assigned with a specific task, each vital to reaching the finish line.  In Someone Builds the Dream by Lisa Wheeler, just a single missing link in the undertaking will prevent final consummation and dash the titular expectation from reaching the final destination.  But this validation of teamwork doesn’t remotely ponder the failings of a work in progress, rather it celebrates the efficiency and passion of those committed to imparting their unique skills to a veritable melting pot of architectural, technological, and engineering acumen, where many hands and minds are needed to carry out ordered and time-orchestrated tasks to achieve the desired result.  In the spirit of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and a few other classic works by Virginia Lee Burton, Someone Builds the Dream is one of the busiest picture books on record, with nineteen spreads displaying physical and mental energy and documenting seven projects, the last of which joyfully brings this exhilarating book full circle.

The prolific veteran illustrator Loren Long has fashioned expansive acrylic and colored pencil tapestries to Wheeler’s bouncy minimalist verse.  A New York Times bestselling artist of the Otis the Tractor  series and The Little Engine That Could with Watty Piper, Long illustrated the poll position hit Of Thee I Sing for President Barack Obama and on September 21st his art for the twenty-three year-old, Harvard educated inaugural poet Amanda Gorman in the work titled Change Sings: A Children’s Anthem.  After a mid-range line-up including a crane, a mechanical shovel and a tractor-plow on the title page spread, Wheeler makes a general statement that defines the book’s theme and foretells its narrative flow:

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Caldecott Medal Contender: Bear Island

by Sam Juliano

    In a melancholic pictorial prologue initiated by a worn, stationary baseball and continued with a dreamy depiction of a short-haired girl playing catch with the family canine, Bear Island’s soulful flashback introduction concludes with a tearful goodbye to the pet known as Charlie in brown tinted sketch drawings that are imbued with the aura of memory.  Wall pictures of the departed family member and the gathering up of its food bowl and toys bring wrenching closure to a period of time Dad, Mom and Louise would do anything to relive.  Then a double page title spread of a butterfly perched on a rock protruding from the sea, done in watercolor, pen and ink achieves widescreen aquatic resplendence, and the story moves to the present.

Picture books about death and the ensuing grief have slowly appeared more frequently in recent years as children, with parental support have come to terms with the difficulty in losing a loved one, and how to make good on the positive energy offered by other family members and especially devoted friends.  Most famously, E.B. White’s 1953 Charlotte’s Web opened more tear ducts than any children’s book up till the time of its publication, and decades later for many it remained the quintessential example of overcoming intense grief, depicting death as a necessary part of life.  Mo Willems’ and Jon Muth’s City Dog, Country Frog examined the cycle of life in similar terms, one where rebirth displaces sadness with the forging of a new friendship.  The same formula was powerfully employed in two recent Caldecott Honor winners, The Rough Patch by Brian Lies and Big Cat Little Cat by Elisha Cooper.

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Caldecott Medal Contender: Unbound: The Life + Art of Judith Scott

by Sam Juliano

Wykoff, New Jersey born and bred artist Melissa Sweet twice finished in the Caldecott winners circle, scoring silver honor medals for a pair of books she illustrated for Jen Bryant, A River of Words: The Story of William Carlos Williams and The Right Word: Roget and His Thesaurus.  On two other occasions, widespread buzz throughout the children’s book community was in sponsorship of two other Caldecott bids, one for Firefly July, a collaboration with the poet Paul B. Janeczko, and the other a solo biography, Some Writer! The Story of E. B. White, a labor of love fully endorsed by the deceased, iconic author’s estate.  In 2011, Sweet won boundless critical acclaim and a Sibert Medal for her Balloons Over Broadway: The True Story of the Puppeteer of Macy’s Parade, a book she wrote and illustrated, one employing toys, puppets and fabrics to create her unique immersive technique where any object found is fair game in crafting all-encompassing art.  Like the Czech master Peter Sis, Sweet is a master of minutiae, and her tapestries are painstakingly rendered in pastel colors in the service of intricate designs that demand the the reader’s full attention, but reward with an emotionally resonant experience.

Perhaps her most deeply moving collaboration to date is with Joyce Scott and Brie Spangler on a biography of the former’s twin sister titled Unbound: The Life + Art of Judith Scott, a picture book about a seriously impaired person who defeats her limitations in a real-life story of astounding perseverance and poignancy.  Scott’s sibling was born with Down’s syndrome and deafness, yet before her disability was confirmed she grew up alongside her sister, sharing all aspects of their lives.  The authors define this propensity as “Entwined” in the opening chapter of the four that comprise the book in thematic terms.  Scott and Spangler define the depth of the relationship as such that they were united upon birth and knew each other even before they negotiated the feel of air on their skin.  Sweet responds with a soulful bedroom canvas of sisterly connection evoking Siamese twins, as the writers offer the metaphor of “spoons nestled in a drawer.”  Dolls, teacups and pails are all matching and the artist’s flower blouse design accentuates the mom’s perception of the sisters as “two peas in a pod.”  Their unique bond spills over into nocturnal bliss when the girls gaze up at the stars lying down on an outdoors couch, locked by Judy’s two-armed squeeze.

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Fifth Annual Allan Fish Online Film Festival: Day #9 “Sound of Metal”

by Sam Juliano

Note:  This was originally scheduled as the final post in this year’s festival.  However, We may yet be getting one more from Adam Ferenz.  Stay tuned!  Scheduling rules do not apply this year!

Dearest Allan:

     This business of wearing masks and social distancing would have had you regaling us with your satirical prowess, though watching from up there I’m sure you have had your fellow angels in stratospheric stitches.  But let’s face it.  You watched all your world cinema masterpieces and wrote your incomparable capsule reviews indoors anyway so there would be little opportunity for you to ever obscure your face or worry about standing in a line.  Feeding your beloved ducks at the pond around the corner from your house wasn’t subject to any protective compromise either.  In any case, our own close friendship would have gotten even closer as during this covid infringement on our liberties you would have had me at your beck and call.  My e mail would be inundated with orders to watch this and that, and my life would basically have been spoken for.  All the frustration you suffered for the better part of a decade in trying to reform the most renowned of philistines would have finally paid dividends. 

      I saw several outstanding films this past year via streaming.  It is purely a guess, but I am thinking the film I wrote here to pay homage to you is one you would have showered with a fair degree of praise.  As always I want to express how much we love and miss you.  Time has not been kind in dimming the grief on your untimely departure.  Still, all of us who benefited from your ornery passion and irresistible persona remain guided by you in spiritial and metaphysical terms as we will for the remainder of our own lives.

 Love,  Sam

     The acute realization of hearing loss is wrought with shocking consternation as one sits in a booth where perfunctory queries are made to a patient reduced to guesswork.  Hearing loss is largely an inevitable consequence of age and genetics but it could also be brought on by bad living choices or a profession that increases the odds of long-term or as in the case of Sound of Metal an all-too-speedy sensory breakdown negotiated by aural bombast.  In the surprisingly unsentimental film, directed by Darius Marder and written by Marder (and his brother Abraham) a punk-metal drummer recovering from drug addiction lives in a time and age where there are some promising options.  Initially “Ruben” defies the advice of an ear doctor who sensibly warns against further exposure to loud noises by staying the course on the performing circuit.  His girlfriend and band-mate “Lou” who travels with him in a recreational trailer is fearful his newfound disability may reverse his sobriety so she helps to arrange a move to a remote rural shelter for recovering addicts who have also lost their hearing.  The commune is run by recovering alcoholic “Joe” whose own ability to negotiate sound-waves was destroyed during the Vietnam War.  At first Ruben refuses to come to terms with their edict that Lou cannot live there with him and that ultimately all he is seeking are cochlear implants which are not covered by insurance but are reachable after he later sells his possessions including the trailer.  Lou persists in convincing Ruben to return to the shelter while she puts their relationship on hold by moving to her father’s residence in Europe.

     Ruben readily becomes acclimated to his new group home and learns sign language.  Joe encourages him to write and to be comfortable with silence, and Ruben administers drumming lessons to the young members.  After Joe reveals that Ruben’s tenure at the home was sponsored by a local church, he offers the brooding tenant a degree of permanence by taking on a job, but restless to his core Ruben is more interested in what Lou is doing and learns online she is experimenting with her own music.  While awaiting the activation of his implants, made possible by the aforementioned pawning of his holdings, Ruben asks Joe for a loan so he can re-but his vehicle, but is denied by Joe who then asks that Ruben leave the home on the philosophy that deafness is not and should not be considered a handicap.  The activation of the implants brings mixed results, though in view of the drummer’s professional pedigree even less, since severe distortion connected with the end result of the procedure can never be satisfying.  He flies to Belgium to move in with Lou and it greeted by the father who tells him he has had an about face in his feelings about his daughter’s boyfriend since the bottom line is that he made Lou happy.  Further realizations that hearing distortion will never allow him a real measure of sensory appreciation coax Ruben into leaving Lou, and some visualized meditative uncertainty.

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Allan Fish Online Film Festival 2020 (Day #5): Way Out – television series – “I Heard You Calling Me” (episode 4)

by Sam Juliano

Those who were fortunate and privileged to know Allan or just even to cross his path immediately understood he was someone quite out of the ordinary.  His incomparable obsessiveness guaranteed that any venture he embarked upon would be afforded a maximum level of accountability.  Most know him for his cinematic prowess, the go to guy for reference, film availability and quality control specs.  Some also knew that movies, astonishingly enough, were not his sole focus.  He was a remarkably astute historian and could hold his own with anyone hankering to discuss music, theater and soccer and his grasp of literature from around the world past and present was beyond exceptional.  His still-unpublished massive tome, though primarily about the cinema, also includes a masterly investigation of television, a field Allan was as passionate about as any other, even to the extent of insisting there be no differentiation with its most towering achievements with those comparable film works.  Any list Allan composed invariably included television mixed together in a somehow comfortable melting pot with motion pictures.  He was a fervent aficionado of British small screen landmarks -often by his own admission serving as his country’s mercenary with the exclusive intent of turning heads of those he derided as American xenophobes.  Mind you Allan was attuned to the best in American television as well and often championed the shows we all do, but he was educated on the international scene and was always proud of Britain, which he once boldly told me eclipsed American television, despite the long list of great shows produced stateside.

This takes me to our family’s trip to England in 2013 when we spent two weeks in London and at Allan’s home in Kendal.  A running joke at that time was a carry-over from online ribbing with Allan as an exasperated host who was beside himself with my lifelong infatuation with American anthology television, particularly the horror and science fiction shows that originally aired in the late 50s through the early and mid 60s.  In a secret conversation with my five kids Allan instructed them to get hold of my DVD collections and books on Boris Karloff’s Thriller, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits and Alfred Hitchcock Presents and hide them so I couldn’t access them anymore.   To be sure Allan himself loved (and included in his book with perceptive and generous entries) them well enough, but were not programs he considered at the forefront of his life.  Due to my sometimes excruciating nostalgic slant and my fondness for anthology television I directed conversations with my friend to these shows much too often and the result was sometimes hysterical chiding.  Allan wasn’t always willing to embrace my incessant defense that this era was my “specialty”, as he knew only too well -as he did when I attended Manhattan movie theaters to see classic films for the umpteenth time – that watching stuff over and over came at the expense of delaying the negotiation of new discoveries was patently absurd.  My kids to this day are in stitches when relating what was said in those talks, though based on our phone and e mail chats I think I have a very good idea.

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Caldecott Medal Contender: Home in the Woods

by Sam Juliano

In the elegiac A House That Once Was, a 2018 picture book by Julie Fogliano with illustrations by Lane Smith, a derelict house is a monument to memories.  The ghostly cabin in the deep woods seems well past the point of architectural resuscitation, and continues to exist in a kind of spectral sphere as a shrine to times well lived.  A similarly dilapidated shack encased in tar paper and nearly to the point of no return is brought back to life when a big and impoverished Depression-era family perform their own effective method of CPR by employing handyman ethics in the sumptuous Home in the Woods by Eliza Wheeler, an arresting story of grit and fortitude set in the Minnesota woods based on the true to life hardships of her grandmother’s family. Wheeler’s book, a love letter to her Nan, the fifth oldest in a family of eight, is a work of astounding craftsmanship in every aspect of its construction.  The painterly dust jacket, bathed in gorgeous yellow, green and turquoise in its evocation of the titular structure, establishes setting in the most pictorially resplendent of terms.  The inside cover, a replication of the text’s winter tapestry and a work of art unto itself, depicts two members of the family heading out to find food may inspire adult readers to recite The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep and miles to go before I sleep.  An annotated map of the family’s rural woodland hamlet appears on the end papers and their own shack lies near a swamp, with only deer paths falling between.  The title page, like the dust cover sports jumbo-font black India ink letters and a miniature facsimile of the most-unlikely of homes for nine people.

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Caldecott Medal Contender: Carl and the Meaning of Life

by Sam Juliano

A domino effect plays out in the narratives of three Caldecott Medal winners, One Fine Day by Nonny Hagrogian , Finders Keepers by William Lipkind and Nicolas Mordinoff, and Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears by Verna Aardema and Leo and Diane Dillon depicts the insect and animal world fielding questions from one chronic questioner.  A fox repeatedly asks for a favor so that his tail can be sewn back on after he absconds with a pail of a pail of milk; two canines try to solve the question about the rightful owner of bone by asking others and a small insect instigates a panic that is sustained as creature after creature is approached to reach the truth in varying conceits. In Deborah Freedman’s similarly cumulative  Carl and the Meaning of Life a field mouse innocuously queries the titular earthworm for his seemingly bizarre underground propensities, setting off a chain of events where the scheme of things is adversely affected after this inveterate truth seeker suspends his indispensable elemental role to investigate its significance.  Soon enough after Carl goes interrogative he finds that also his prospective respondents are busy supporting their own families or keeping up the own end of the bargain to help keep the world ecologically sound.  After trial and tribulation the now nomadic earthworm encounters a bereaved beetle who through its own manner of deprivation provides the long-elusive answer that sends its enlightened mercenary to again function profoundly so the world can maintain its equilibrium.

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