The Red Book (Caldecott Honor Book)
by Barbara Lehman
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Book Reviews of The Red Book (Caldecott Honor Book)
Book Review: The only little red book you'll ever need
Summary: 5 Stars
It's official. The results are in. The year 2004 can now officially be declared the "Best Year of Wordless Picture Books" on record. This little appreciated genre of fiction has rarely ever been given its due. Yet now we can enjoy such marvelous stories as "The Boy, the Bear, the Baron, the Bard" by Gregory Rogers and "Home" by Jeannie Baker. And then, to top it all off, is the frosting on the cake. "The Red Book" by Barbara Lehman, which stretches the boundaries of picture books everywhere and spices up its story with a distinctly post-modern edge. Some author/illustrators might find it exceedingly difficult to write a picture book, within a book, within a book, without adding so much as a gasp or sigh to dot the text. Not Lehman. The result is this marvelous Caldecott Honor winner that deserves your full undivided attention.
The story is a misleadingly simple one. A girl walking through a gray winter cityscape finds the corner of a bright red book peeking out of a snowbank by the sidewalk. She rescues the item and takes it with him to school. A quick perusal of it shows that it is a story about a warm sunny island, where a boy walking along the sand also finds a red book, this time peeking out of a sandbank. As the boy on the beach reads it he sees that is a story about a city... in which a girl in her classroom is reading about him. The two kids realize what is happening and are intrigued. So what is the natural solution to this problem? The city girl leaves school for the day and buys as many colorful balloons as she can from a local street vendor. The balloons carry her up... up... up above the industrial uniformity below, causing her to accidentally drop the book. It lands on a sidewalk where we see the island boy sitting on the sand waiting. As the wind flips the pages of the book the island boy sees the city girl coming in for a landing and they joyfully meet up with one another. Then the red book closes and someone else picks it up and rides away on his bicycle. Undoubtedly to participate in a whole new adventure.
Did you get all that? It's a little difficult to summarize this tale if only because Lehman, as an author/illustrator, is so doggone adept. And though it sounds complex, I assure you that almost every five-year-old you show it to will grasp the concept immediately. This is the kind of story that teaches them all about breaking down the fourth wall... in a preschool kinda way. Entirely aside from the concept, however, are Lehman's great pictures. It's funny, but until now Lehman hasn't illustrated or written anything particularly well-known. Her style is like that of a sophisticated Amy Schwartz (of "What James Likes Best" fame), with simple characters and distinct lines. But where Schwartz relies on simplicity to the point of wide open spaces, Lehman has filled this particular book with beautiful geometric lines and angles. The city girl's classroom is all angles and kids in straight rows. And she's especially good at distance and characters' points of view. For example, when the city girl floats above his shrinking metropolis and drops the red book you have a beautiful view through her eyes of the book falling to the street, far below her little blue boots. Then there are the colors. In the city, everything has that dull uniformity of a wintery city. On the island everything is bright and sunshiny (making for a lovely contrast when the boys see one another through the book). Finally, the city girl's method of travel, her balloons, are bright beautiful multicolored orbs that are just as noticeable in the urban sky as they are the island.
For a logical pairing to this story, consider reading "The Red Book" alongside David Wiesner's, "The Three Pigs". Both stories present deft original deconstructions of old picture book motifs in a style that kids everywhere will wonder at and enjoy. Admittedly, after reading this book I am a little sad that "Kitten's First Full Moon" (which I loved... don't get me wrong) won the Caldecott in 2005. But at least this story has gotten the full attention it so richly deserves. A lovely addition to any child's collection and a truly memorable tale.
Book Review: Wordless wonder!
Summary: 4 Stars
This is, of course, a wordless picture book about... magic and friendship, I guess.
A girl on a cold, snowy day finds a red book and opens it in class. She sees a boy on a beach doing the same thing - and he sees her! I love the shocked look on their faces as they realize what just happened there. The story just runs from there, of course, in a perfectly logical (if weird) sequence.
Some people object to wordless picture books on principle, because they are unfamiliar with them. This is what I have to say to that:
Wordless picture books are PERFECT for pre-readers. It gives them the ability to read a book - REALLY own the experience instead of just "playing" as they must do when they can't understand the words - on their own. It gives them practice in putting together stories and working out details from context. And it allows them to be the expert at some activity that is usually restricted to adults and older children in their life - reading a book.
By that same token, they are also ideal for early readers. It's non-threatening, and yet it's still a way to practice following a storyline. Reading is more than just mechanically putting together sounds and reciting them, after all. Many people are impressed by a five year old who can say, word-perfect, some complex piece he or she "reads" from a page, but later they find out that the child has no idea what they just read and wasn't thinking of reading as an exercise in gleaning meaning from text, but merely as reciting memorized sounds and letter combinations. Working out the story for themselves from a book with no words is a wonderful way to practice this sort of "reading for meaning".
But what of the child who stumbles in reading? Well, the child who stumbles when reading but can tell you WHAT they read is light-years ahead of the one who sounds pretty but doesn't grasp the meaning. At any rate, this child is still getting much needed practice in the conventions of reading without the letters to stress and trip them up.
Of course, you don't want the only book in your house to be a wordless picture book, I understand that, because children do need print to practice reading, but a few are a WONDERFUL thing for a child. And who has just one book, anyway?
Book Review: Caldecott Honor, but disturbing: No stars.
Summary: 1 Stars
Let me say first, that our daughter, who is 5, loved the book. But her father and I found it very unsettling. So much so that we got rid of it.
What makes it so creepy? When you read it - or look at the illustrations - they seem innocent enough. But when you really look at what is going on - a young girl disappears after reading a red book she finds on the street - it felt as if this little girl was almost abducted. She seems to simply vanish from her city, her home, and she doesn't come back - or at least the story never alludes to this. Where did she go? To an island where another young child sadly sits - holding another red book. Was he taken in by the book, too?
But what made us really feel uncomfortable was the end of the story. After the little girl drops the book when she drifts away on a fistful of balloons, one of the girl's classmates - a boy who sits in front of her in school and seemed to take interest in the red book when she brought it to school - picks the book up (almost like it was his book to begin with). He then gets on his bike and begins to ride away. The parting image is of the boy riding his bike on a deserted wharf: gray, overcast skies, cold, choppy water. As he's riding away in the frame, he's looking back at us, the viewers, book in tow. He has this odd look on his face. He's wearing glasses, you can't see his eyes, either. We couldn't help but wonder: did this kid have something to do with snatching the girl to begin with? Did he originally "lose" the book, knowing that the girl would find it and then he could get her?
Honestly, my husband and I buy many, many children's books for our kids. Some are great, some just ok. But we've never had such a visceral and uncomfortable reaction to a book before. We are both writers and we love to read - but this was just too much disturbing innuendo for both of us. To us, there was nothing innocent or charming or imaginary about it. It was almost menacing.
I'd love to know if anyone else feels this way after looking at The Red Book.
Book Review: A Very Nice Wordless Fantasy
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a simply yet eloquently drawn wordless book delivering a charming fantasy, undoubtedly influenced by David Wiesner but with a quite different artistic style. A girl is walking to school when she spies in the snow a red-covered book, which she recovers and carries in her book bag. During class she opens it and discovers that it is a portal to another book, just discovered by a boy on a beach. She is mesmerized by this scene until class ends and she straggles out behind her classmates. On the way home she buys a large bunch of balloons, which carries her into the air, and she drops the book. The boy at the other end of the portal is saddened by this, but is then delighted to look up from his book and find that the balloons have carried her to meet him. Meanwhile, someone else has found the red book... and so the story ends
Wordless books do require more effort for adult readers, but they are excellent for helping children learn to interpret visual images, and afford an opportunity for self-"reading". This one is a straightforward, creative and easy-to-follow fantasy that would be a great step toward more complex stories. Older children will enjoy discovering the many layers of meaning embedded in the visual images. Younger children will enjoy pretending they are in this story, and it may lend a sense of wonder and potential to new, unknown books that they encounter.
Book Review: The Red Book
Summary: 4 Stars
What can books do exactly? Do they truly have the power to connect people? The Red Book does seem to have that power. It says The Red Book on its spine, and it is a red book so it keeps to the truth though it becomes fantastic as its story unfolds. It shows a little girl running on its cover as though about to turn the corner of the cover's edge. The viewer is drawn to follow her to the in side of the book, as though entering a space. A double page cityscape unfolds. We the see our little girl as she walks along the city's streets and finds a red book. Opening it she discovers a map showing a boy on an island finding a red book. They regard each other through the picture-window of the book. She seeks out a balloon vendor, buys a bundle of balloons that carry her away to the boy's island but drops her red book. A boy on a city street finds it and there we may assume the story begins again. Barbara Lehman's soft flannel-textured flat gouache illustrations allow us to be comfortably drawn into the pages on the imaginative journey offered by The Red Book.