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"Not a Stick" |
For Children
Not a Stick
By Antoinette Portis
HarperCollins, 32 pp., up to age 7, $12.99
Chicken Feathers
By Joy Cowley
Illustrated by David Elliot
Philomel Books, 160 pp., ages 7 and up, $15.99
"Not a Stick" by Antoinette Portis celebrates the great talent of childhood - the gift of unfettered imagination. Fans of her picture book for very young readers, "Not a Box," will be glad to see her ingenuity back at play. "Not a Stick" begins with an unseen offstage voice warning our young hero, "Hey, be careful with that stick." The young pig (right)answers as any self-respecting child would: "It's not a stick." And that, of course, is just the beginning of the journey. The not-a-stick transforms from a shark-catching fish hook to a parade baton; an artist's paintbrush; heavy weights; a horse; a spear; a sword; and finally, a dragon-taming leash.
One has to love and admire Portis' joyful rendering of childhood's wild improvisations. And she practices what she is preaching - imagination is the key to everything. She sets the visual and verbal stage as simply as possible. Few words, white space, big swaths of unlikely colors, work as hard here as the figures, which are nearly stick-figure plain, with some of the rough homemade quality of hip online cartoons.
Portis' humor is deadpan. It's quiet. Motion occurs not simply within each picture but from picture to picture, reality to fantasy, back and forth.
Color, too, plays a vital and unusual role in "Not a Stick." She uses a full-page background of drab brown for that parental "be careful with that stick" while the answering "It's not a stick" takes on a background of deep, rich, marine blue facing a pale lemon-colored sky. Brown, blue and yellow - with the occasional splash of pure white - chase each other all through the book. Brown, the flattest color here, accompanies the grownup's dull questions and even duller warnings: "Watch where you point that stick," "Don't trip on that stick." The child never wavers from the "It's not a stick" position except for occasional emphasis, as in "What stick?" or "This is NOT NOT NOT a stick!"
The book is slyly funny, subtle, composed and poignant. A few jokes are aimed at the adult reader - the "stick" paintbrush renders Van Gogh's famous "Starry Night." But then, Van Gogh once said, "Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model." He would surely have approved of this book. Children will, and so will their grownups.
Joy Cowley, beloved and prolific New Zealand children's book author - she has written over 600 books - is first to tell readers she was "hatched on a chicken farm." She grew up around animals, and continues to write beautifully, affectionately, and accurately about them. Her newest novel, "Chicken Feathers," pays fond homage to her fine feathered friends, especially in its weird and eccentric heroine, Semolina, the talking, slightly alcoholic hen.
Semolina talks only to her boy Joshua, and that gets him into hot water with his mother and father. Josh's parents have their hands full - the hens on their farm are not laying well, Josh's prickly grandmother has come to help out as his mother struggles through a rocky pregnancy. Josh's dad tells him, "Your mom and I are not good layers, and that's the truth of it. We thought we'd be right this time."
Cowley has voice down to an art. She knows just how to drive a story forward; her seemingly effortless mastery is a joy to behold. Illustrator David Elliot creates humor and nostalgia with his black and white drawings, reminiscent of Garth Williams's timeless art in "Charlotte's Web."
"Chicken Feathers" is funny, exciting, touching, even romantic. Josh nurses a crush on his lovely and kindly neighbor: "Annalee was so pretty that sitting next to her made his breath hurt in his chest . . . Her lipstick was pink and so shiny it made her mouth look wet. He stared at her and forgot to talk."
But when Semolina (in exchange for some "brown water" brew) informs Josh that a fox is after the hens, the pacing quickens, and readers are in for a heart-pounding ride. Sweden had Astrid Lindgren, and France its Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Each great writer possesses the genius of his or her own place, and Joy Cowley can lay fair claim to New Zealand's literary landscape.
Author Liz Rosenberg reviews children's books monthly for the Globe.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
