Review by New York Times Review
SPRING IS (ALMOST) HERE. It's time to be thinking about your garden, if you have one. Even if you don't, thinking about gardens - renewal, growth, wildness, creativity - has its own reward. As three new picture books with dramatically varied styles of illustration show, a garden is an idea that can be approached from starkly different directions. A garden can be art: sculpture made from greenery. So it is in "The Night Gardener," a debut written and illustrated by the brothers Terry and Eric Fan, set in a gray town where green things are happening. Every morning the townspeople discover that another large tree has been reshaped into magnificent topiary. The vivid animal figures spark delight in this grim place. Young William, who lives in an orphanage but is apparently free to come and go, happens one evening upon the Night Gardener, a mysterious old man with a walrus mustache who (because this is William's book, or his fantasy) engages the boy as apprentice. In a marathon night of climbing and clipping, a park becomes a menagerie of giant, leafy creatures. As the depressed town turns celebratory, illustrations that started out monochrome go full-color. Then, in a riveting sequence of spreads, a green vista of sculpted animáis - giraffe, emu, rhinoceros - turns autumn-colored and finally reverts to plain, bare-branched trees. The townspeople were never the same, says the text, and neither was William. The lesson: You don't have to live a dull life if you exercise your imagination. The message itself is none too new, or helpful. What's worth the admission in this book is in the illustrations. They use a realistic cross-hatched style that sits, if at times slightly awkwardly, halfway between traditional old engravings and the looser lines of more modern artists like Edward Ardizzone. Still, they achieve a lovely, luminous effect. Illustrator-authors often write themselves stories involving spectacular scenes of fantasy; it's understandable. Those scenes will be the lure for children, as the elaborate tree-animals are for William. Real topiary couldn't be created from trees like this, but illustrators can do things that horticulturists can't. The gardens in "Tokyo Digs a Garden," written by Jon-Erik Lappano, are about abandoning control, not exercising it. The world of young, quirkily named Tokyo begins without a garden. It's a cramped urban landscape in which tall buildings have eaten up all signs of nature. In a strangely archaic moment, a mysterious old woman gives the boy three wishing seeds. He lifts a brick and pokes them into the ground, and soon the city is engulfed in forests. Monkeys swing from trees and ruined roads turn to rivers where salmon jump. The result is a kind of Eden, but the buildings are still part of it. Tokyo's worried grandfather ponders, "What are we going to do?" "I think," Tokyo says, "that we will just have to get used to it." This moral, too, about living harmoniously with nature, is heavy-handed, and the explosive reforestation the book presents is alarming. But the text attempts some levity with Tokyo's ice-cream-craving cat, and the final picture also soothes a bit: a scene of a row of houses with colorful vegetation on roofs and balconies. "Gardens have to grow somewhere, after all," the narrator says. For a parable about wildness, Kellen Hatanaka's illustrations take an unlikely approach: They're elegant and midcentury modern, all bold, flat shapes, crisp edges and beautiful colors. Abstraction prevails, to the point where Hatanaka's stylized faces lack features like eyes and noses. But the pictures are also full of energy, popping colors and some sly humor, if you look. Little children's eyes may fill in the modernist blanks and see the sprawling richness implied in the text. Older children might well appreciate the sophisticated design. Adults who like artistic picture books should take to this one - I find it a thing of beauty. Beautiful in a very different way, "Stories From Bug Garden" comprises 11 tiny stories by Lisa Moser describing the lives of bugs in an abandoned plot of land - no mysterious old person in this book stirring up magical transformations. You can see from Gwen Millward's doodly cover drawing that the bugs in question will be winsome cuties and not those things that bite and swarm and ruin your plantings. This garden may be wild, but its function is recreational. There's a bee, a horsefly, a butterfly, a couple of ants, a worm and more, but they're really toddlers in a playground: They swing on a gate, try to get a peach down from a tree, float a makeshift boat on a pond. Compactly told in short lines, these pieces are part beginning-reader stories and part poetry. In spirit they remind me of Arnold Lobel's wonderful Frog and Toad books. I loved the nine-line-long episode in which Bee sits on a branch, watching clouds, rejecting the others' suggested activities. "What do you want to do, then?" they ask, allowing the final line to be "'Just be,' said Bee." The stories aren't all successful - some stray too far from reality (when friends gather to watch flowers explode into bloom, it's like fireworks, but flowers don't do that). Yet even when flawed, these tales carry a sense of purpose, of meaning more than what's apparent. At their best they feel like little puffs of wisdom. Millward's watercolor, ink and pencil drawings highlight the stories' whimsy; her google-eyed characters and obsessive, scribbly vegetation add up to a rousing expression of cheer. In the profusion of leaves and flowers, there's a missed opportunity to reward close viewers with amusing details, but maybe next time. It all looks great, anyway, particularly considering that her color palette consists largely of light greens and bright oranges, hues that standard printing inks can never reproduce with full vibrancy. While all three of these books celebrate the stirring of life in some way, they represent about the widest variety of garden experiences I can imagine. Put together, they spell out the true meaning of garden variety. PAUL O. ZELINSKY has illustrated many books for children and won the 1998 Caldecott Medal for his "Rapunzel."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 7, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
Life on Grimloch Lane is, well, pretty grim until the morning William awakens in his home at the Grimloch Orphanage to discover that something marvelous has happened overnight: through topiary art, the tree on the street has been transformed into a giant owl! And that's just the beginning. Each morning thereafter, a new topiary work appears: first, a cat, then a rabbit, then a parakeet, and finally the most magnificent masterpiece yet appears: a majestic griffin. Who is responsible for these marvels? That night, as William is about to head home, he spots a stranger and follows him. Could it be? Yes, it is the Night Gardener, and he asks William to help him. The next morning, the gardener is gone, but he has left William a life-changing gift. Though not quite life-changing itself, the Fan brothers' quiet story is nevertheless invested with an element of agreeable magic which is underscored by their use of muted colors to evoke the mysteries of the night. It is a pleasing collaboration with art bound to both haunt and delight.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Brothers Terry and Eric Fan set their first story in a dreary town and imagine what happens when it is transformed by a gardener's skill. William, an orphan, sits glumly in front of his orphanage scratching an owl in the dirt as a stranger walks by. After dark, readers see the stranger at work with his shears in a tree in front of the building. In the morning, the man's artistry is revealed: the tree has been shaped into an owl like the one William has drawn. The town, initially rendered in gray pencil, shows a blush of color as people gather to marvel: "Something was happening on Grimloch Lane. Something good." A topiary parrot appears, an elephant, a magnificent dragon; townspeople of varying ages and ethnicities rejoice, and the spreads take on livelier hues. One night, William spots the gardener, follows him, and gets a topiary lesson. Though the gardener leaves soon after and the trees revert to normal as the seasons change, the town thrives, as will William, it seems clear. A treat, with artwork worth lingering over. Ages 4-8. Agent: Kirsten Hall, Catbird Productions. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
PreS-Gr 2-With spare text and a simple palette, The Night Gardener tells the story of a depressed town's transformation with the help of a nocturnal gardener. The book begins on Grimloch Lane, a street where every head hangs down and an orphan boy, William, is down in the dumps. A dapper elderly man with a green leaf shining in his pocket passes him, and the magic begins. Every night, a new fantastical topiary appears in a tree on Grimloch Lane, to the neighborhood's delight. People begin playing outside, drawing, playing the tuba, and looking up in wonder: it's an urban planner's delight. William gets to tag along one night, and as the season changes, the work of creating community-revitalizing topiaries is passed to him. The illustrations look like a more cheerful Edward Gorey, done with a blend of fine-tip ink and pencil work and watercolor, with the night portrayed in pearly monochromatic blues. While most of the characters are white, a few background characters wandering through the trees are people of color. VERDICT An elegant picture book that celebrates creativity and community; for first purchase.-Lisa Nowlain, Darien Library, CT © Copyright 2016. 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 Kirkus Book Review
Grimloch Lane is a gray place where individuals trudge along wrapped in their own thoughts, until a man carrying a ladder and tools enters their sphere. Clad in almost-gray greenand seemingly unaware of the similarly attired boy drawing a feathered creature in the dirthe proceeds to a nearby tree. After the moonlit title page, morning breaks with narration that accompanies this child now gazing in wonder from the orphanage window. A gigantic, familiar owl has been formed from the tree's foliage. Ensuing evenings yield ever more amazing creatures; color creeps into the scenes as neighbors gather in admiration and spruce up their dilapidated homes. (Both the night gardener and the boy are white, but the neighborhood is multiethnic.) The Fan brothers contrast creamy, uncluttered pages of daytime community life with magical forest-green evenings that culminate in an invitation to help. The pair's resulting leafy menagerie in the park is rendered even more evocative when the page turn reveals the blazing deciduous trees dropping their sculpted shapes. But no matterthe neighborhood has been changed permanently, as has the boy. The final double-page spread depicting the young man shaping his own playful topiary is an uplifting testament to the effect that a caring adult can have on a lonely child. An economic text punctuated with commas, questions, and ellipses leads readers forward; highly textured graphite and deepening, digitally colored compositions surprise and delight. Visual pleasure abounds. (Picture book. 4-7) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
