She loved the feel of the pencil in her hand. The dance and glide of a line. How a new colour could change everything.
Author Kyo Maclear on illustrator Gyo Fujikawa
The Important Thing
About Margaret Wise Brown Mac Barnett
Illustrated by Sarah Jacoby Balzer & Bray
The Important Thing About Margaret Wise Brown, by Mac Barnett, is a biography about a well-known figure in children’s literature.
Brown’s classic book, Goodnight Moon, about a bunny being tucked in for the night, was a favourite bedtime book for both my sons when they were young — as I imagine it has been in countless households since the book first appeared in 1947.
Other titles came before and after; young readers and listeners will have fun spotting them (one of those books, They All Saw It, is read aloud by Mac Barnett in a YouTube video that’s sure to appeal to all ages) in Sarah Jacoby’s illustrations of bunnies in a library, interspersed with images of Brown herself — and her dog, Crispin’s Crispian.
Barnett’s text takes us from her childhood “in a house next to the woods” to her difficulties with people like influential children’s librarian Anne Carroll Moore in New York City. In a voice appropriate to this book’s intended readership (ages 6 to 9 or thereabouts), Barnett admits “you can’t fit somebody’s life into 42 pages,” but he nevertheless manages to fit in quite a lot — including some strange and unexpected stuff, like the author having skinned a dead rabbit as a child and, as an adult, having loved “a woman called Michael / and a man called Pebble.”
It’s all presented matter-of-factly, and Barnett — who periodically mentions the number of pages left for his story — acknowledges that some people don’t think such strange stuff should be in a children’s book. “But it happened,” he writes. By the time he gets to the final page and the most important thing about Brown — “that she wrote books” — he has brought the woman’s indomitable spirit to life in a truly unique way.
It Began With a Page:
How Gyo Fujikawa Drew the Way Kyo Maclear
Illustrated by Julie Morstad
Tundra Books
It Began With a Page, by Toronto’s Kyo Maclear, is the life story of Gyo Fujikawa, an Asian-American woman who created some of the best-loved baby books and, in the process, broke new ground in children’s literature. By the time my first child was born in 1975, Babies and Baby Animals (both still in print now, as board books) were already classics. We pored over the pictures and enjoyed the books for years, never knowing that the author-illustrator had to do battle with her publisher to people the Babies book, published in 1963, with more than just white infants and toddlers.
Born in Berkeley, Calif., in
1908 to first-generation Japanese immigrants, Gyo Fujikawa was drawing incessantly by the time she was five years old. “She loved the feel of the pencil in her hand,” writes Maclear. “The dance and glide of a line. How a new colour could change everything.” (Vancouver’s Julie Morstad, who illustrated this biography, fills a two-page spread with various images of young Gyo and her little brother, including a tongue-in-cheek drawing of Gyo immersed in a large book titled Goethe’s Theory of Colour.) Not all the images in this book are lighthearted, however. Fujikawa’s family, who lived on the West Coast, was sent to an internment camp for Japanese Americans during the Second World War. (Gyo, working for Walt Disney Studios in New York City at the time, avoided imprisonment because she was living on the East Coast.) Morstad’s illustrations of this period, including a double-page spread of Gyo’s mother setting fire to all their belongings rather than selling them to junk dealers for mere pennies before the family’s relocation, are particularly poignant. Fujikawa family photographs accompany a two-page timeline and a note from Maclear and Morstad at the end of the book, which is aimed at ages 5 to 8.