Dahlov Ipcar’s ‘Black and White,’ and More
Children’s books By
The New York Times, Sunday Book Review - JUNE 19, 2015
The night, as a fervent
lyric made famous by Patti Smith implies, may not belong to preschoolers. But
it is nonetheless a time — and mystery-laden phenomenon — that fascinates all
young children, and arouses fear in many. From the ritualized consolations of
“Goodnight Moon” to the antic rebellion of “In the Night Kitchen,” picture
books have charted countless courses through the dark. The tradition continues
in three new books and one notable reissue.
“Edmond: The Moonlit Party”
starts off, auspiciously, with three sharply drawn, idiosyncratic animal
characters who live as neighbors in an old chestnut tree. Edmond, the
diffident stay-at-home squirrel, makes nut jam, devours adventure stories and
spends “his evenings making pompoms.” Mr. George Owl plays dress-up, and
gregarious Harry the bear throws late-night dance parties. The reader is led to
wonder: When party time next rolls around, will Edmond join in the fun?
The French writer Astrid
Desbordes adores her quirky characters, and her enthusiasm is contagious. She
notes with admiration the care with which George stores his costumes and the
time it takes Edmond to complete one of his “magnificent” pompom hats. Details
like these firm up and anchor a story, especially one tailored for younger
children, in whom concrete thought still predominates. So it feels like a
momentary wrong turn toward the abstract when Harry announces his intention to
serve a “nothing tart” at his next party (a what?); and again when George,
sounding like an owlish existentialist, muses on the seagull’s carefree “life
of wind and waves.” The illustrator, Marc Boutavant, who is also from France,
does a better job of keeping the threesome’s escapades grounded in specifics.
His exuberant, balloon-bright graphics — a stylish retro-Pop brew with winsome
notes of Takashi Murakami and Richard Scarry — set a party mood long before shy
Edmond decides the time has finally come for him to step out onto the dance
floor.
From "The Night World."
While the night sky serves
as a backdrop to Edmond’s awakening, the transformative power of darkness is
key in Mordicai Gerstein’s “The Night World.” A house cat rouses a little boy
from bed for a late-night ramble. Together they make their way through darkened
interiors and out into the front yard. What to the boy has long been familiar
territory now looks and feels both exciting and strange. “Are these shadows
roses?” the boy wonders. “That shadow is a deer.” Painting in a subtly
modulated palette of grays and blacks, Gerstein, who won the 2004 Caldecott
Medal for “The Man Who Walked Between the Towers,” offers readers a kind of
night-vision-goggles view of a child’s absorbing adventure in perception. In
perhaps the most remarkable illustration, Gerstein freeze-frames a moment just
before dawn as color seeps back into the world. We glimpse a frenzied scene of
scurrying raccoons, birds and other nocturnal wildlife, all mixed up in a
gorgeous tangle of light and shadow. For Gerstein, an old-fashioned Romantic,
wonder lies everywhere for those prepared to see it, and wide-eyed 4- and
5-year-olds look to be among the prime candidates.
Gerstein’s fable unfolds as
a kind of waking dream. But in Dahlov Ipcar’s “Black and White,” real dreams
are made visible: the dreams, as it happens, of two frisky, elegant-looking
dogs — one black, the other white. A clever plot twist doubles as an inspired
metaphor for the dogs’ friendship: Their strikingly similar dreams feature a
variety of animals with black-and-white coloration that combines their own —
penguins, zebras and antelopes, among others.
From "Edmond: The Moonlit Party."
“Black and White” was first
published in 1963, the year of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream”
speech, and Ipcar has acknowledged her wish that her story might be read, in
part, as an appeal for racial equality. Yet this is not just another message
book. The daughter of the sculptor William Zorach and the artist Marguerite Zorach,
Ipcar, now 97, illustrated her first picture book, “The Little Fisherman,” with
a text by Margaret Wise Brown, in 1945. Brown, best known as the author of
“Goodnight Moon,” remains America’s peerless poet of early childhood, and it
would seem that more than a little of Brown’s puckish wit and calming lyricism
rubbed off on her collaborator in this waggish tale about a “little black dog
and a little white dog” with big dreams.
What, though, of the little
girl who speaks the title line in “Tell Me What to Dream About”? She and her
big sister are chattering away at lights-out in the room they share. But what
exactly are we overhearing? An anxious child’s forlorn complaint, or a classic
bid to keep the conversation going a while longer at bedtime? Either way, the
younger child’s request and her sister’s indulgent responses give Giselle
Potter all the reason she needs to paint a series of playful, faux-naïf,
surrealist-inflected fantasy tableaus, nearly all of them suggested by a toy,
fabric pattern or other visual prompt in the room.
It is sad of course to
imagine a child feeling all thumbs about dreaming. Might this then be a
bellwether tale about the rumored dire effects of overabsorption in new media?
Maybe yes and maybe no. But it is just as plausible to read Potter’s scenario
as an old-fashioned reminder that young children almost always have too much to
absorb, and that for them a quiet story time in the company of a nurturing
parent or caregiver is a reliable antidote to a day’s worth of newness and chaos.
Margaret Wise Brown waxed wise indeed when she described the essential
difference between the ordinary run of stories that children tell themselves
and those to be found in the children’s books that rise to the level of
literature. “A child’s own story,” Brown observed, “is a dream, but a good
story is a dream that is true for more than one child.” A very particular
little girl like the one we meet here might well be unsatisfied with her own
and her sister’s improvisations. But the evocative dreamscapes of “Tell Me What
to Dream About” are another story.
EDMOND: THE MOONLIT PARTY
By Astrid
DesbordesIllustrated by Marc Boutavant
32 pp. Enchanted Lion
Books. $17.95. (Ages 4 to 8)
THE NIGHT WORLD
Written and illustrated by
Mordicai Gerstein
40 pp. Little, Brown &
Company. $18. (Ages 3 to 6)
BLACK AND WHITE
Written and illustrated by
Dahlov Ipcar
40 pp. Flying Eye Books.
$17.95. (Ages 3 to 7)
TELL ME WHAT TO DREAM ABOUT
Written and illustrated by
Giselle Potter
40 pp. Schwartz & Wade
Books. $17.99. (Ages 3 to 7)
Leonard S. Marcus is the author, most recently,
of “Randolph Caldecott: The Man Who Could Not Stop Drawing.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/books/review/dahlov-ipcars-black-and-white-and-more.html?contentCollection=books&action=click&module=NextInCollection®ion=Footer&pgtype=article
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