Review by New York Times Review
WHERE is home - and why do we yearn for it so? Many celebrated children's books, directly or indirectly explore these questions, from "The Little House " by Virginia Lee Burton, to Margaret Wise Brown's "Little Fur Family" to Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" series. In "A Home for Bird," Philip C. Stead, the 2011 Caldecott winner for "A Sick Day for Amos McGee," seeks to answer them in a more lighthearted way. The story concerns a toad named Vernon who finds a wooden blue bird fallen off a speeding pickup truck. Bird says nothing as he is introduced to Vernon's friends, Skunk and Porcupine, in fact, throughout the story, Bird is mute while Vernon shows him the river and forest and his other favorite places. Skunk and Porcupine speculate that Bird is lost and homesick, so Vernon searches for a home for his new friend: a bird cage, a birdhouse, a nest. When none of these elicit a reply, Vernon and Bird go on an aerial journey in a teacup tied to a balloon. The search ends ingeniously with Bird happily installed in an empty blue cuckoo clock. It is there we finally hear Bird's voice and the story comes full circle (observant readers will notice the conclusion was quietly and cleverly set up in the opening pages). Stead's splashy, colorful pictures are warm, funny, appealing and drawn with a light touch. Skunk and Porcupine are portrayed with soft, blurry edges that add to their charm. Often, Stead uses color to make emotional and symbolic connections, as when Bird finds a home in a clock of the exact shade of blue he is. Taken together, text and image convey the message that each of us has one true home and nothing else will do. The former poet laureate Ted Kooser's "House Held Up by Trees" is a lyric, poetic story, stark but also imbued with a haunting beauty. One could easily imagine the tale, in a slightly different form, as a Kooser poem for adults. A man and his two children live in a country house set "on a bare square of earth." The emotionally distant father is intent on creating and maintaining a perfect lawn. His children, however, love "to play among the trees" in the adjacent wooded lot. From the outset, tension exists between nature and human nature, the daughter and son finding solace in the outdoors even as the father continually tries to mow it down and contain it. Time passes, the children grow up and leave, and eventually the old man moves away too. The empty house becomes derelict, the windows broken out, the paint flaking, sparrows nesting inside. Without people, the house and its surroundings become the story's main characters, one passive, the other active. As nature takes over, seedlings sprout everywhere and grow into saplings, and finally into trees that raise the broken home off the ground. Jon Klassen's illustrations are quiet, delicate and nuanced, amplifying the text in fresh, original ways through the use of unexpected angles and perspective. The pictures follow the house through different times of day and night, and through seasons and years. A powerful image of a house held aloft like an offering in the hands of nature closes the book, an image that stayed with me long after. The story's preoccupation with emotional isolation, abandonment, decay and transformation has keen parallels, I thought, with the arc of some human lives (a metaphor that will, fortunately, sail over the heads of most young readers). The power of nature to win out or hold sway over modern life is similarly taken up in "Out of the Way! Out of the Way!" by Urna Krishnaswami. In a village in India, a tiny tree sprouts in the unlikeliest of places, the middle of a dusty, well-worn path. A small boy carefully piles stones around the seedling to keep it from being trampled, and it steadily grows into a majestic tree as the path becomes a busy road, and then an even busier highway full of roaring traffic. The title, used very effectively as a refrain throughout the book, emphasizes that change is hurrying us along much faster than we want logo. The chaotic, packed pictures by Uma Krishnaswamy (a different person from the author), a combination of primary colors and black-and-white line drawings, have an old-fashioned, outdated feel to them. Children who like the "busyness" and manic activity of books by the writer-illustrator Richard Scarry might like these. But for some readers, myself included, the art could feel a bit too busy and bewildering, lacking as it does a focal point. Maybe this is the point: that there is no one place to focus, relax or stop in our unsettled world, except perhaps under the spreading branches of a tree that has managed, against all odds, to flourish in the middle of a road. All three of these books speak to our deep need for quietude and sanctuary, and for that actual and metaphorical place called home. Like light, air and water, home is something we cannot do without, whether it's in the form of a cuckoo clock, a house held up by trees or the space of silence beneath a spreading tree. Elizabeth Spires's most recent book is "I Heard God Talking to Me: William Edmondson and His Stone Carvings."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 13, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
The almost-same-named author and illustrator also share a cheery tone in presenting this tale of a road and the tree that sprouts in the middle of it. Ignoring the repeated cries of annoyed passersby (see title), a young lad protects and guards the seedling until it grows large enough not only to have birds nest in it, but also to force the road itself to bend out of its way, out of its way. Meanwhile, the road, initially just a narrow red ribbon winding through a busy jumble of small houses and simply drawn people in distinctive Indian dress, broadens and becomes a heavily-trafficked thoroughfare over the years. Krishnaswamy uses a crowded mix of outlined forms and broad daubs of greens and warm color to capture the growing bustle but then closes with a view of the now-stately tree surrounded by empty space to go with her counterpart's suggestive observation that passing drivers sometimes stop and stay a while . . . and listen. An evocative picture of time's passage, as well as a reminder of nature's value, in our modern lives.--Peters, John Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
At the outset of this lighthearted account of life in an Indian village, a boy carefully places rocks around a baby tree growing in the middle of a path. "Out of the way! Out of the way!" a mango seller yells. Before long, that cry has new meaning: the tree has grown so big that people must swerve to avoid it. Ox-carts give way to cars. Machines come to pave the road, "sputtering their way carefully around the tree." Krishnaswamy's (And Land Was Born) naif, folk-art figures crowd the pages, selling things and carrying huge loads on their heads, while birds dart and cows wander along. Krishna-swami's (The Grand Plan to Fix Everything) fanciful prose has an e.e. cummings feel (a crush of blobby vehicles goes "from here to there and back again"). The action can be hard to follow because it's so diffuse; the boy grows from a young man into a silver-haired grandfather, but he is not always the focus of the story's action. Still, it's a rare thing: a book about generations and growth that doesn't come across as preachy. Ages 4-7. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
K-Gr 3-A boy finds a sapling on the dirt path that runs through his village in what appears to be India and protects it with a ring of stones. As the tree grows, villagers reroute the path around it, while bikers and oxcart and motor scooter drivers cry, "Out of the way! Out of the way!" The tree continues to grow, providing a home for animals and a meeting place for people beneath its branches. A city grows beyond the village, the dirt path becomes a paved road for cars and trucks, the boy becomes a man with his own children. Through the years, people learn to carry on their activities "out of the way" of the tree rather than sacrificing it to make way for themselves. They even take time, occasionally, from rushing "from here to there and back again" to sit under it and listen to the old stories. Krishnaswamy's charming folk-art illustrations, executed in mixed media, combine black-and-white drawings with blocks of color. Alert readers will notice that many of the orange outline drawings on the endpapers are echoed throughout the book, in color or in pen and ink. The road cuts through every page, either in a continuous stretch or as winding patches carrying people's footprints as they circumvent the tree. There is much to see and enjoy in the small paintings and drawings that make up each scene. This delightful story illustrates how tradition and modern progress can coexist in a way that benefits everyone.-Marianne Saccardi, formerly at Norwalk Community College, CT (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
This look at urban development manages to stay cheery and upbeat as an Indian village grows into a city. Traffic of all kinds, animals, and people keep moving on the road past a small tree that grows through the decades and retains its importance as a meeting place. Traditional and contemporary imagery is artfully combined in black line drawings and swaths of bright colors. (c) Copyright 2012. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A boy in India sees a baby tree growing by the side of a dusty path, and, because he protects it, it flourishes throughout his lifetime despite the changes to the landscape around him. Krishnaswami's spare text tracks the tree's growth over time, with the titular refrain "Out of the way! Out of the way!" giving voice to those who hurry past it. Mixed-media pictures inspired by India's arts-and-crafts tradition depict the path turning into a lane, then a street, then a road, signaling the rapid development that transforms the landscape from a quiet, sleepy village into a busy town. Meanwhile, the boy grows into a man, and the tree becomes a meeting place for local people. The message to stop and smell the roses (or enjoy the tree) comes through effectively as spreads become more and more saturated with imagery that crowds out white space. Some readers may be unable to easily identify the boy who leads off the story from page to page, but the text seems less interested in following his character than on attending to the tree's particular role in providing a place of rest and beauty. And in that, it succeeds beautifully. A lovely, unique contribution. (Picture book. 4-8)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
