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Tag Archives: picture book for older readers
a year without mom + interview with dasha tolstikova
A Year Without Mom by Dasha Tolstikova (October, 2015).
I’m a huge fan of Dasha Tolstikova’s illustrations (see: The Jacket; see: her website.). And this new book is a wonderful showcase for her art and storytelling.
Kind of a middle grade graphic novel, A Year Without Mom tells the story of Dasha’s 12th year in Moscow, the year her mother leaves for America to attend school. If you loved Jane, the Fox and Me, I think you’ll love this book too.
It’s one girl’s growing up, with specificity of characters and moments and friends and feelings. Swan Lake on the television during political unrest. A trio of friends and the worries of feeling left out. School. Slights. Worries. Insecurities. Spurts of joy. New discoveries. Cold, cold Russian winter. Dasha’s crushes: Petya who’s the coolest ever as well as the nice guy who’s always there in art class, Maxim.
The whole book so beautifully captures the pre-teen and early teenage years, moreso perhaps because of the absence of Dasha’s regular caregiver. Every event is infused with the swings and sways of adolescence.
But it all adds up to something wonderful to read and behold. Something true about childhood and change and resiliency. About how the way we grow up shapes us even as we have no idea we’re being shaped. About how children need an anchor, like a mother, in the midst of the turmoil and mundaneness of everyday life at school. About how our stories are our own.
The book begins and ends in two entirely different places, but with the same girl, with the same name, with the same pink cheeks. That girl’s going to be okay.
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This Picture Book Life: Can you tell us about how you’d classify this book in terms of memoir or fiction or combination of both?
Dasha Tolstikova: I was actually just asked today by the Swedish publisher of AYWM (what?! A Swedish publisher? I know! I am so excited!) whether I would mind if they refer to the book as a graphic memoir – which I think is very interesting. But really it’s a combination of both memoir and fiction – real life events and situations are a jumping off point – my mom DID go to America to study, I DID stay with my grandparents, I DO have best friends named Masha and Natasha – but there are also some places where things are exaggerated to move the plot forward.
TPBL: When did you have the idea and how did that turn into a graphic novel/lengthy picture book for Groundwood?
DT: The book started out as a graduate thesis project while I was at the School of Visual Arts. I had come across another Groundwood book actually, called Harvey, and became obsessed with it and its format – a picture book novel about a boy who comes home to find out that his father has died – and wanted to immediately make a book like it. It felt right to base it on a story that happened to me. I knew that I wanted it to be for older kids – so a story that happened when I was twelve seemed appropriate.
And I also knew from the beginning that I wanted it to be a long book. My first dummy was 212 pages and I had thought I would be able to finish the whole book in six months for our graduate show (hahahaha) – but then only completed the first chapter.
Sheila Barry, the wonderful Groundwood publisher, found my work online about a year after I graduated and thought it might be the right fit for them – obviously I was thrilled – I had felt (hoped?) like I was making it for Groundwood all along. And it was incredible to have someone in my corner while I DID finish the whole thing – it took two years – I scrapped everything I had done at school and started the art from scratch.
TPBL:The illustrations in A Year Without Mom are fantastic. This may sounds simplistic, but I love the variation in pages. You use white space, then a spread filled up with gray. You vary your composition to great effect so that we’re kind of zooming in and out with different page turns, seeing details then people then settings. Can you talk about your process and vision with illustrating a lengthier book like this?
DT: Thank you so much!
I really wanted every illustration to be emotionally meaningful, but also to be coherent and to move the story along – so I spent a lot of time thinking about individual compositions, but also about the flow of the book as a whole. I made a lot of really haphazard dummies and also these crazy diagrams – almost like shot lists for a movie.
TPBL: What’s your medium and who are some of your influences?
DT: I draw with a mechanical pencil and use sumi ink washes on Arches Hot Press watercolor paper. For this book all the color was added digitally.
Some of my illustration influences are: Anne Herbauts, Beatrice Allemagna, Laura Carlin, Marc Simont, The Provensens, Zach O’Hora, Isabelle Arsenault, Hadley Hooper, David Roberts, Tomi Ungerer, Carson Ellis – I can keep going for a long time…but then there are also fine artists and novels that I read and movies and everything around me all the time.
TPBL: How much American popular culture was part of your growing up in Moscow and what was your relationship to it?
My friends and I were actually pretty snobby about American pop culture when we were growing up – and I wasn’t super excited to move to the States – but I don’t even know what we were basing our opinions on – it’s not like we had a lot of exposure to it – we did read a lot of classics (Dickens and whatnot) and there was a sort of cult of England when I was growing up – so maybe America seemed in opposition of that somehow? But also maybe we were just bratty children.
But then there were American movies – which we LOVED – they screened a lot of old movies in movie theaters and we went frequently. After I moved away Masha continued to go on her own and eventually studied to be a director of photography in Paris.
They did broadcast soap operas and I got really into Santa Barbara as a child – when I moved to the States I was SO EXCITED to find it on TV – except of course the episodes they were showing in Russia were from much earlier seasons and none of my favorite characters were even on anymore.
TPBL: I assume you were 12 or so years old during the coup against Gorbachev. Did life change after that?
DT: You know, it did – but this is actually where the book is really true – that first year after the coup was a pretty selfish year for me – navigating life with my mom in America and growing up – I remember the personal stories a lot better – and I did move to the States in 1992 – I think things got even crazier politically after that – my former classmates have some intense stories of what life was like in the 90s – but I wasn’t there anymore…
TPBL: Can you tell us what happened after the book ends in terms of your own life? Did you really only stay in America for one year and then go back to Moscow? What about Maxim?! What is your story of moving to America and that adjustment?
DT: After my mom and I came to Urbana – we ended up staying for nine years – I went to high school and college there and she got her PhD. We went back to Moscow pretty frequently and after I graduated from the University of Illinois I moved back for about three years. Maxim is an amalgamation of two boys I had crushes on at the time – one of them continued to go to art school with my cousin and they even ended up at architecture college together – she said he asked about me from time to time – which warmed my heart, of course – the other boy I still have a little crush on and sometimes see out and about when I am home visiting my grandmother…
The adjustment of moving to America is something I am toying with as a subject – I feel like it’s such rich material and then also MIDDLE SCHOOL!
TPBL: The book is an entire year in which the character’s mother is abroad. How do you think that changes life for a twelve year old? What does one miss out on and what does one gain from that kind of experience?
DT: You know it’s hard for me to say – because this was my actual experience I can only speak to how it affected me – I think I grew up a little faster – but who knows what would have happened had my mom NOT gone to America, it might have all been the same, or entirely different. I generally feel like ALL experience propels us forward – it’s all it can do really – bad or good – so I think I tend to think of things that happen to me as stories – so this happened and then that – and it wasn’t good or bad it just happened and now I’m THIS kind of person – it’s sort of a positive sum game.
TPBL: Finally, your opening is this really interesting technique of almost a prologue, then a visual introduction to the setting and main character. That prologue is: “Once, when I was very small, I bit my mom’s finger.” It takes quite a few pages for us as readers to hear about that occasion. Tell us about why you used it to frame the opening and what it tells us about the character of Dasha.
DT: I wanted something that highlighted the relationship between the mother and the daughter immediately. It’s also a real thing that happened that I remember. I was about three and mom was feeding me a tomato and I bit her finger really hard – not on purpose – the tomato was just really good.
Thank you so much for having me.
Big thanks to Dasha for talking to us and for providing images!
the blue whale by jenni desmond
The Blue Whale by Jenni Desmond (out May 27, 2015!)
This is one of those nonfiction books whose facts somehow make me cry. It’s partly the set up in the author’s note that blue whales are few in number due to human activity, from hunting to pollution. But it’s not just that. It’s the way this material is handled—from how the text is constructed to the dreamy illustrations.
(click image(s) to enlarge)
Part of Jenni Desmond‘s originality is how the story appears in the story of the picture book. The boy in the book is reading the very book we’re reading.
But there’s more! He enters the book. There he is, in a dinghy next to a mighty blue whale, staring down in wonder. Because this book is immersive. Immersive in the azure world of the blue whale.
The boy with the red crown is excited about this book he’s reading, excited about blue whales, excited about animals and habitats.
“Every blue whale has unique markings, similar to our fingerprints. Scientists use these, along with the shape of the dorsal fin, to identify individual whales.”
Together with the boy, we learn that baby calves are born 20 feet long and drink nearly 50 gallons of their mother’s milk every day. That whales have a lot of wax in their ear canals. That a single one of their breaths could inflate 2,000 balloons.
Along with the boy, we feel the world open up. It gets bigger and the blue whale gets smaller. Closer. More precious to us.
“A blue whale’s tongue weighs three tons, and its mouth is so big that 50 people can stand inside it. Fortunately, blue whales don’t eat people.”
And that’s how this book works. It brings the boy character inside it, it brings us inside it and conversely it brings the blue whale into our world, right outside our window and in our kitchen.
It’s the perfect kind of nonfiction book that educates while it enchants. It makes us care.
Thanks to Enchanted Lion Books for images!
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Jenni Desmond was kind enough to answer a couple of questions about her process of making the book!
This Picture Book Life:What prompted you to write a book about this particular animal?
Jenni Desmond: I didn’t choose a blue whale on purpose, it chose me, by just falling out of my head onto the page one day. Then, the more I drew this beautiful mammal the more I fell in love with it. There is still so much we don’t know about blue whales. I just found them endlessly fascinating and beautiful, and kept wanting to know more. When I showed the rough sketches to my wonderful editor, Claudia, at Enchanted Lion Books, she understood my vision for the book and tirelessly helped me to sculpt it into something much more complex and interesting.
TPBL: You include the book itself in the text and illustrations. How did the idea to do that come about?
JD: I wanted the reader to be aware of the fictional element of the story versus the factual. By having the young boy holding and reading the book, I felt that it would mean that there was a clear divide between the two. The facts could stay as facts, and the reader knew that the inclusion of the boy in the images, when he was interacting with the whale, was purely a result of the boy’s vivid imagination.
TPBL: Boy with red graph paper crown. Go!
JD: I think sometimes non-fiction can feel quite dense and difficult, so I hope that by including the boy, the reader can have a little bit of respite to digest the information while they watch the boy having fun, hopefully even seeing themselves in the boy. I‘m not sure why he’s wearing a crown. Why not. Maybe he’s the king of the book. Maybe he likes dressing up. Maybe it’s just a nice shape and gives a splash of colour to the page. Maybe it’s all of these things.
Thank you, Jenni, both for the interview and for this outstanding book!
the red piano, picture book
The Red Piano by Andrê Leblanc and Barroux (2010).
There aren’t a ton of picture books about The Cultural Revolution in China, but as China’s history fascinates me, I was very happy to find The Red Piano.
It’s an incredible book about a young girl, a re-education camp, and the piano that connects her to memories of her old life, to freedom.
(click image(s) to enlarge)
“For several years now, pages from Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier have been passed round the camp, from hand to hand. The father of a friend sends parcels. Several sheets are hidden in each package. If there is an inspection, they are confiscated and she has to hope for another package.”
There is a piano, miraculously, hidden in the camp. Music is what helps the girl survive. Remember. Feel human, feel hope.
One day, she’s discovered, and punished. “The music in her heart subsides.” Until, another day, it is all over.
The illustrations are bleakly beautiful. Stark. Cream paper, ink gray, bleeding bursts of red.
The story is inspired by concert pianist Zhu Xiao-Mei‘s true story.
You may also want to check out the middle grade memoir, Red Scarf Girl, which covers the same historical period.
wolves in the walls
The Wolves in the Walls by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Dave McKean (2003).
Creepy title, creepy cover, right?!
This reads like a book for older kids and even adults. In part, because it’s kind of scary, this idea of wolves in the walls. And those mixed-media illustrations! Super scary. Also wonderful for their use of real photographs and line drawings that together, give me the creeps. In a good way.
Lucy is the wise one in her family, we come to know that. She’s the one who knows there are wolves in the walls. Her family doesn’t believe her. They also say that if wolves are in the walls and wolves come out of the walls, “It’s all over.” Lucy’s wiser than that too. (She also knows her pig puppet is someone real you can talk to unlike her parents, so there’s one more reason she’s wise!)
If we relate this book to fears, other fears, the message is solid. Sometimes fears are real, but they may not pose the threat we think. We may be able to tolerate them. Even overcome them. Even if they are wolves in the walls.
The details make this great too. Lucy’s father is a tuba player. The mother makes jam. Lucy’s animal friend is a pig puppet (as in, the three little pigs and the wolf!). And when the wolves get hold of that berry jam, red like blood, the result is ferociously unsettling.
The ending, which I won’t give away, is one more detail to consider. It has to do with Lucy knowing a new thing and what she’ll choose to do with knowing it. It’s as original as the rest.
the bathing costume or the worst vacation of my life
The Bathing Costume: Or the Worst Vacation of My Life by Charlotte Moundlic and Olivier Tallec.
This comes from the pair that created The Scar, a beautiful, brilliant book (which I’ve featured here). But that one’s a sad book. This one is also beautiful but without the sadness. Instead, you might say it has a dose of melancholy. But it’s also funny. Quirky. Charming. Real.
click image(s) to enlarge
It’s for the older set because the main character is eight and the text is lengthier than most. But also because a kid, a growing up kid, will really relate to this diary of a failed (then won!) summer vacation.
(See how those brilliant summer blues and yellows gleam from the pages?)
The whole book is written matter of factly. The way Myron might really narrate things.
Myron’s a bit behind. He hasn’t lost a baby tooth yet and he’s ripe for teasing. His vacation will be without his parents and brother, at his grandparents’ house with cousins.
“Grandma asked me if I was happy and I muttered, ‘Yes…Yeah, sure…’ What else could I say? I didn’t want to tell her that I was about to have the worst vacation of my whole life.”
And then there’s the bathing costume of the title. (That’s what Myron’s grandmother calls it.)
“This summer I’m eight. And in the family, the summer when you’re eight is the summer when you have to jump off the 10-foot diving board.”
The poor kid only has his older brother’s yellow bathing suit, so the thing hangs off him like crazy at the city pool. He has to hold it up and there’s a moment when his bare bottom’s in the air. And that high dive? So not happening. What child (or grown up) can’t relate to this story?
Not to worry though. There’s change ahead. (Sadly, not in the form of a new bathing suit.) The power goes out one night and relationships shift. The family heads back to the swimming pool. One of Myron’s teeth gets very, very loose! And he walks up the ladder to the high dive. I’ll let you guess what happens next.
The last diary-like entry is the opposite of the first one. The way some camp or vacation diary-entries really are about-faces. The lucky ones. When worst vacations turn into the best.
