Flowers Are Calling. By Rita
Gray. Pictures by Kenard Pak. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $16.99.
Just a Dream. By Chris Van
Allsburg. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $18.99.
Fact and fiction often
merge, sometimes seamlessly and sometimes less so, in nature-focused picture
books. Despite some awkwardness in Rita Gray’s writing, Flowers Are Calling is a fine example of mixing the real and unreal
– thanks in large part to the lovely watercolor-and-digital-media illustrations
by Kenard Pak. Gray’s basic rhyming text works well, and takes an unusual
approach toward involving children in a fact-focused book by deliberately saying
something incorrect and then providing the correction. “Flowers are calling a
little black bear./ No, not a bear! He doesn’t care./ They’re calling a
butterfly to dip from the air.” So far, so good, and in succeeding pages,
flowers call a frog – no, a bumblebee; a porcupine – no, a hummingbird; and so
on. True, the rhythm of the poetry is frequently off by a syllable or so, but
young readers will probably not mind and may not even notice. However, a number
of the rhymes are off as well: “porcupine” and “time,” “raccoon,” “bloom” and
“perfume.” Readers likely will notice
this; but again, it may not significantly interrupt the book’s flow for its
target audience of children ages 4-8. But what is sure to interrupt things is
the way Gray, after each batch of three rhymes, presents two pages identifying
specific flowers and explaining, in prose, what they are and how they attract
and interact with pollinators. Then she returns to the rhyming sequence, then
the non-rhyming factual pages, and so on. The result is considerable choppiness
in presentation. However, the excellent illustrations, as noted, do a lot to
preserve continuity as well as visual interest – and the material that Gray discusses
is highly interesting and offered in age-appropriate fashion, which means that
the book’s message about the importance of insects, birds and other creatures
involved in pollination comes through clearly despite the book’s somewhat
unwieldy structure. The last pages introduce children to flowers in ways they
may not have considered, relating to the importance for pollination of color,
pattern, shape, smell and time of opening. And then Gray presents a strictly
didactic page, at the very end of the book, with more facts about flowers and
their pollinators and even some things that children can do to help nature take
its course. The educational elements of Flowers
Are Calling are so well done that they and Pak’s pictures raise the book to
a very high level, more than overcoming some structural elements that make
Gray’s work less natural in flow and less pleasant to follow than it could have
been. This is nevertheless, despite its ungainly elements, a book of
considerable value, and a lovely one at which to look and from which to learn.
It is possible, though, to
lay things on too thickly, albeit with the best of intentions, in trying to
teach nature-related things to young children. And this is the flaw of Just a Dream, now available in a 25th-anniversary
edition that includes a downloadable audio version read by the author. Chris
Van Allsburg’s book is partly a victim of its age: when it first came out, in
1990, young people’s (and adults’) awareness of ecological matters was far less
than it is now. For example, it is noteworthy that the film Wall-E, which had a significant impact
on many young viewers, dates only to 2008. However, there was certainly some ecological awareness in 1990 and
for many years before: Dr. Seuss’ The
Lorax was published back in 1971. There is something instructive in comparing
elements of that book with those of Just
a Dream. Dr. Seuss tremendously simplified matters of ecology and knowingly
created a title character whose grumpiness and hectoring actually troubled some
in the environmental movement, who thought The
Lorax unnecessarily heavy-handed and humorless (at least by Seussian
standards). Van Allsburg, though, uses a far bigger sledge hammer than Seuss
did: his story is about a boy named Walter who throws trash onto the street and
refuses to sort recyclables from garbage, but is converted to the cause of
ecological right-thinking by an experience right out of A Christmas Carol. That is, he falls asleep and dreams himself in
various highly unpleasant future scenarios: in a huge dump where his street and
home used to be; in a giant tree that is about to be cut down to make
toothpicks; atop a smokestack belching fumes for a company that makes medicine
to counteract the “burning throats and itchy eyes” caused by its smokestacks
themselves; and so on. The future here is not only unremittingly bleak but also
so absurdly unrealistic that Just a Dream
seems a lot more like an advocacy pamphlet than a concerned educational work
intended to show children the possible consequences of inattention to the
environment. Van Allsburg’s illustrations of the awful future scenes are very
well done, but his writing is so thin and obvious that it vitiates rather than
reinforces what ought to be a highly important message. And the conclusion, in
which Walter is converted to the correct way of thinking as surely as Scrooge
was, is entirely predictable, laying on the message even more thickly than the
rest of the book does. Just a Dream
is a (+++) book thanks to the underlying seriousness of its message and the
very fine illustrations with which Van Allsburg tries to put that message
across. But unlike The Lorax, Van
Allsburg’s book has not worn very well, because from start to finish it is more
a jeremiad than an involving story.
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