picture book art

Bob, not bob!

| ejessmurray

Y’all. J’adore.

Liz Garton Scanlon and Audrey Vernick must have had themselves in stiches writing this one, it’s so dang joyful and clever. And Matthew Cordell channels his inner Roald Dahl for delightful, exuberant, absurdist art, the perfect foil for a book about being so sick, no one, not even your beloved mom, can understand a thing you’re saying.

When poor Little Louie’s cold is so bad that his stuffed-up pronunciations has his dog Bob coming running when he calls for his mom, you know it’s gonna be a rough few days. For everyone.

But who saves the day? Louie’s intrepid mom, who wisely gives in to babying her baby (and the delightfully giant, drooly, and snuggly Bob), and the look of pure love on Louie’s face…

I can’t remember if I read or heard an editor say in passing (Karen Boss??) that she often finds picture books a lonely place for the MCs, and that really stuck with me.

And while no one is disputing the culture and counter-culture, the solo butt-kicking, SELing, problem-solving, and world-changing;

the ambiguous, hole-poking, could-be-this, could-be-that, is-it-just-a-joke thinkery that goes on in lovely picture books everywhere, I could eat this one with a spoon all day everyday.

Sometimes, our kids just need us, and we love them just by loving them.

THE OLD TRUCK

| ejessmurray

One of the pleasures of reading picture books for the first time is the way they renew our sense of discovery. Picture books are sprints, but the best ones create richly evocative worlds, compressing time and experience into something that reflects or approximates essential elements of our lived encounters. The first time I read Jarrett and Jerome Pumphrey‘s THE OLD TRUCK, a feeling of immense poignancy washed over me. I blinked back tears and tried to sound “normal” as I finished speaking the last page. That’s what an incredible picture book can do.

THE OLD TRUCK, Jarrett & Jerome Pumphrey

The Pumphrey brothers’ book is direct, simple, and fundamental, but also mysterious. Emotionally, THE OLD TRUCK exists firmly in a maternal/parental space or cadence, but who is the steadying and fortifying mother? I think it is the truck–which was there at the beginning, when a pregnant mother is about to give birth, and is there at the end, when the daughter of that mother is now a mother of her own little girl and raising her on the same farm. I also loved seeing a black family centered in this farming story.

The eponymous truck is akin to a tutelary spirit, a household god. And like our gods and watchful spirits, it both gives and receives, supporting the family with its labor, but also in need of rest, repair, and perhaps most importantly dreaming. The truck’s imagination feeds the girl’s imagination. The girl’s imagination, translated into creativity, into hard work, feeds and preserves the family and the family’s way of life.

THE OLD TRUCK is one of those books I’m tempted to keep talking and talking about, but I’ll stop. Go and see for yourself. And scoop up their about-to-be released PB: SOMEWHERE IN THE BAYOU.