Rock by rock The fantastical garden of Nek Chand

The Partition of India and Pakistan looms behind Bradbury's warmhearted account of the life of Nek Chand (1924--2015), who built a secret sculpture garden outside Chandigarh. When Chand encounters a plot of forest that reminds him of the ancestral village he left behind, "missing moved from his heart to his hands, and his hands knew what to do." He begins using found objects and trash to construct paths and sculptures, and "the more he created, the more he wanted to make." When the expanding city collides with his hidden garden, the community embraces it, defending it from destruction. The vibrant color and layered spatters, scribbles, and patterns of Boughton's collage-like digital illustrations cleverly nod to Chand's mosaic-like sculptural work in images that conjure the clamor of city life and the respite of a secret garden. Back matter includes photos, additional context about Chand's life as a refugee of Partition, and a timeline. Ages 4--8. (Feb.)

Not a formally trained artist, Nek Chand built the famed Rock Garden in Chandigarh, India, "rock by rock," using discarded and found materials. Bradbury's text illuminates the artist's intuitive creative process as a means of easing his feelings of dislocation and homesickness after the Partition of India causes him and other Hindus to depart their ancestral villages, now considered part of the new Muslim nation of Pakistan. "That missing moved from his heart into his hands, and his hands knew what to do," writes Bradbury in the scene where Chand first finds the secluded piece of land on which he builds the garden, with its myriad sculptures, structures, and a "maze of tunnels and paths and arches and stairs." The garden serves as both a monument to the home Chand lost and a secret means of bringing joy and beauty to his new home. When others discover the garden (now grown to cover over forty acres), they are astounded, and the community rallies to save it from officials who threaten to tear it down in the name of development. Throughout, Boughton's illustrations burst with color. The art emulates Chand's use of found materials in its incorporation of newsprint and fabrics into digital collage. The illustrations make several overt references to some of Chand's actual figures, structures, and mosaics, with back-matter pages treating readers to photographs of the Rock Garden and of Chand himself. Pair with Rosenstock and Nivola's The Secret Kingdom (rev. 3/18). Megan Dowd Lambert July/August 2021 p.132(c) Copyright 2021. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.